Primary and secondary variants of juvenile psychopathy differ in emotional processing

Abstract

Accumulating research suggests that psychopathy can be disaggregated into low-anxious primary and high-anxious secondary variants, and this research may be important for understanding antisocial youths with callous-unemotional traits. Using model-based cluster analysis, the present study disaggregated 165 serious male adolescent offenders (M age = 16) with high scores on the Youth Psychopathic Traits Inventory into primary and secondary variants based on the presence of anxiety. The results indicated that the secondary, high-anxious variant was more likely to show a history of abuse and scored higher on measures of emotional and attentional problems. On a picture version of the dot-probe task, the low-anxious primary variant was not engaged by emotionally distressing pictures, whereas the high-anxious secondary variant was more attentive to such stimuli (Cohen d = 0.71). Although the two groups differed as hypothesized from one another, neither differed significantly in their emotional processing from a nonpsychopathic control group of offending youth (n = 208). These results are consistent with the possibility that the two variants of psychopathy, both of which were high on callous-unemotional traits, may have different etiological pathways, with the primary being more related to a deficit in the processing of distress cues in others and the secondary being more related to histories of abuse and emotional problems.