Clinical Child Psychology and Psychiatry

http://ccp.sagepub.com Adolescents' Ability to Read Different Emotional Faces Relates to their History of Maltreatment and Type of Psychopathology
Tatyana Leist and Mark R. Dadds Clinical Child Psychology and Psychiatry 2009; 14; 237 DOI: 10.1177/1359104508100887 The online version of this article can be found at: http://ccp.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/14/2/237

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Adolescents Ability to Read Different Emotional Faces Relates to their History of Maltreatment and Type of Psychopathology
TATYANA LEIST
School of Psychology, University of New South Wales, Australia

MARK R. DADDS
School of Psychology, University of New South Wales, Sydney & Institute of Psychiatry, Kings College London

A B S T R AC T Emotional processing styles appear to characterize various forms of psychopathology and environmental adversity in children. For example, autistic, anxious, high- and low-emotion conduct problem children, and children who have been maltreated, all appear to show specic decits and strengths in recognizing the facial expressions of emotions. Until now, the relationships between emotion recognition, antisocial behaviour, emotional problems, callous-unemotional (CU) traits and early maltreatment have never been assessed simultaneously in one study, and the specic associations of emotion recognition to maltreatment and child characteristics are therefore unknown. We examined facial-emotion processing in a sample of 23 adolescents selected for high-risk status on the variables of interest. As expected, maltreatment and child characteristics showed unique associations. CU traits were uniquely related to impairments in fear recognition. Antisocial behaviour was uniquely associated with better fear recognition, but impaired anger recognition. Emotional problems were associated with better recognition of anger and sadness, but lower recognition of neutral faces. Maltreatment was predictive of superior recognition of fear and sadness. The ndings are considered in terms of social information-processing theories of psychopathology. Implications for clinical interventions are discussed. K E Y WO R D S antisocial behaviour, callous-unemotional traits, emotion recognition, maltreatment

EMOTION PROCESSING ABILITIES

are becoming a major focus of research into developmental psychopathology as increasing evidence indicates that numerous forms of childhood psychopathology can be distinguished by specic biases and decits in emotion recognition. Further, there is some evidence that these biases and decits may

Clinical Child Psychology and Psychiatry Copyright The Author(s), 2009. Reprints and permissions: http://www.sapepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav Vol 14(2): 237250. DOI: 10.1177/1359104508100887 http://ccp.sagepub.com 237
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CLINICAL CHILD PSYCHOLOGY AND PSYCHIATRY 14(2)

distinguish between subtypes of disorders necessitating distinct forms of intervention. For example, autism is associated with impaired face discrimination and emotion recognition, particularly in relation to fear (e.g., Adolphs, Sears, & Piven, 2001), such that these individuals experience a heightened and subjectively aversive emotional response when viewing the eyes of others (Dalton et al., 2005). Adults and children with high anxiety selectively attend to threatening stimuli. While much of this research has used reading tasks involving emotional words, recent research has shown that levels of anxiety in children are associated with increased processing speed for search tasks with angry faces, but poorer recognition (e.g., Easter et al., 2005; Hadwin, Garner, & Perez-Olivas, 2006). On the contrary, children and adolescents with major depressive disorder show decits in the encoding and recall of fearful faces (Brotman et al., 2004). This nding is consistent with imaging studies showing similar discrepancies in increased versus reduced amygdala activation in anxious and depressed participants respectively while viewing fearful faces (Thomas et al., 2001). Emotion processing styles may also differentiate between subtypes within unitary disorders. Recent literature has provided considerable support for the idea that antisocial behaviour disorders in young people stem from a variety of genetic and environmental aetiological factors (Caspi et al., 2002; Frick & Dantagnan, 2005; Frick & Ellis, 1999; Jaffee et al., 2005; Moftt, 1993; Viding, Blair, Moftt, & Plomin, 2005). Importantly, the relative impact of these factors appears to vary according to subtypes or components of antisocial behaviour. For example, persistent and proactive antisocial conduct in children and adolescents has been linked to stable, biological temperament characteristics (Dadds & Salmon, 2003; Viding et al., 2005; Wootton, Frick, Shelton, & Silverthorn, 1997). By contrast, reactive and impulsive antisocial conduct is particularly inuenced by environmental factors, specically poor parenting (Viding et al., 2005; Wootton et al., 1997). These ndings indicate the heterogeneity of causes underlying antisocial behaviour and highlight the importance of identifying specic mechanisms through which these factors exert their inuence on subsequent behaviour. Emotionality has emerged as one important mechanism linking distal causal factors with current engagement in antisocial behaviour. Both low and high emotionality have been linked with conduct problems (Frick, Lilienfeld, Ellis, Loney, & Silverthorn, 1999). However, different levels of emotionality predict distinct patterns of antisocial behaviour (Frick, Stickle, Dandreaux, Farrell, & Kimonis, 2005) and correlate with

TAT YA N A L E I S T is a forensic psychologist who completed her Master of Psychology degree at the University of New South Wales in 2007. She works within the prison system carrying out assessment and treatment of a variety of juvenile and adult offenders. She is interested in the treatment of adolescent groups showing severe problems with substance use and mental health, and treatment of sexual and violent offenders. M A R K R . DA D D S is a Principal Research Fellow of the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia and Professor of Clinical Child Psychology at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, and the Institute of Psychiatry, Kings College London. He is interested in the development and treatment of behavioural and emotional problems in children, and their relationship to parenting and family processes. He directs a specialist treatment centre at the University of New South Wales in Sydney and maintains his own clinical practice. C O N TA C T :

Mark R. Dadds, School of Psychology, University of New South Wales, Sydney 2052, Australia. [E-mail: m.dadds@unsw.edu.au]
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different factors (e.g., Frick et al., 1999; Wootton et al., 1997), suggesting unique underlying causes. Low emotionality has been linked with proactive aggression (Kimonis, Frick, Fazekas, & Loney, 2006) and attenuated responding to the distress of others (e.g., Blair, Colledge, Murray, & Mitchell, 2001; Kimonis et al., 2006). High emotionality is associated with a more hostile and volatile emotional style (Dodge, Pettit, Bates, & Valente, 1995), where aggression is typically a reaction to a real or perceived provocation (Frick & Morris, 2004). Low emotionality is often referred to as a callous-unemotional affective style. Callousunemotional (CU) traits include a lack of empathy, few feelings of guilt or remorse, shallow or supercial emotions, and callous use of other people (Frick & Ellis, 1999). CU traits have emerged as a marker for a particularly aggressive and antisocial group of individuals and are conceptually similar to the affective component of psychopathy (Frick & Ellis, 1999). As CU traits are a primarily emotional decit, impairment in the processing and recognition of emotion is likely to exist among high CU individuals. In fact, Blair (1995; Blair & Coles, 2000; Blair et al., 2001) theorized that it is through their role in the recognition of emotion that CU traits contribute to the development of extreme antisocial behaviour. He suggested that in normal development, the distress cues of others result in aversive physiological arousal, which acts as a punishing stimulus, making distress-causing actions undesirable. This process of avoidant conditioning fails if the child has a poor understanding of others distress coupled with a low innate fear of punishment (Dadds & Salmon, 2003). This theory highlights the role of fear in the development of empathy and is also in accordance with Kochanskas (1993) proposition that fearfulness is a key temperamental component in the development of conscience. In support of his theories, Blair and Coles (2000) found that impaired recognition of sad and fearful facial expressions was related to higher levels of CU traits in a community sample of early adolescents. The childrens ability to recognize the other basic emotions (happiness, surprise, disgust and anger) was unrelated to levels of CU traits. Blair et al. (2001) replicated these ndings in a sample of early-adolescent boys with emotional and behavioural difculties. However, neither of these studies examined the unique contribution of CU traits to emotion recognition by controlling for the potentially elevated levels of antisocial behaviour among CU individuals. A more pure relationship was found by Dadds et al. (2006), who, by controlling for antisocial behaviour, found that CU traits were uniquely associated with poor recognition of fear. One of the aims of the present study was to examine the relationship between CU traits and distress recognition while controlling for antisocial behaviour and adverse early experiences in a sample of young people where these factors were likely to be elevated. Antisocial individuals without CU traits have been shown to have a highly reactive emotional style (e.g., Loney, Frick, Clements, Ellis, & Kerlin, 2003) and to have a wide repertoire of aggressive responses (Dodge et al., 1995). Wootton et al. (1997) posited that children with and without CU traits develop conduct problems through different causal mechanisms and found that whereas CU children were likely to engage in antisocial behaviour regardless of the parenting they received, non-CU children were more likely to engage in antisocial behaviour if they were exposed to ineffective parenting practices. Ineffective or harsh parenting inuences subsequent information-processing strategies, where an individual may become excessively attuned to threatening cues (Dodge et al., 1995). Consistent with this, Dadds et al. (2006) found that antisocial (lowCU) adolescents were likely to misinterpret neutral faces as angry, and ironically, fail to accurately categorize angry faces. None of the above studies have considered, however, that children with behavioural and emotional problems have histories characterized by disrupted, low
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quality caregiving and high levels of maltreatment. This is important because a separate body of research has shown that emotion processing difculties are a possible consequence of early maltreatment and have been explored as a mechanism through which maltreatment exerts its inuence on later behaviour. Emotion perception and then regulation develops as a child learns to allocate their attentional resources to salient emotional cues (Pollack, Klorman, Thatcher, & Cicchetti, 2001). This normative process is disrupted when children experience inconsistent or harsh caregiving, in which the emotional consequences of their behaviour become less predictable (Dadds & Salmon, 2003) and certain cues become more salient indicators of threat (Pollack et al., 2001). Maltreated children have been shown to have general and specic decits in the recognition of emotion (Dodge, Price, Bachorowski, & Newman, 1990; Pears & Fisher, 2005; Pollack et al., 2001). There has been debate as to whether maltreated children, however, are more sensitive to threatening emotional cues than non-maltreated children, or whether maltreated children interpret emotionally-neutral expressions as threatening. Pollack and colleagues (Pollack, Cicchetti, Klorman, & Brumaghim, 1997; Pollack et al., 2001) showed that physically abused and neglected children were more sensitive to, and more accurate at recognizing, expressions of anger than happy expressions. The authors suggested that maltreated children allocate more processing resources to anger cues, as anger is an indication of threat (Pollack et al., 2001). Similar biases toward angry faces are evident in anxious children (Hadwin et al., 2006). At the level of attributional schema, Dodge et al. (1990) described a hostile-attribution bias in severely aggressive adolescents, whereby neutral intent is often incorrectly interpreted as angry intent. Consistent with Dodge et al. (1990), Dadds et al. (2006) found that conduct-disordered children without CU traits were more likely misidentify angry faces and to label neutral facial expressions as angry. However, no studies have examined anger recognition patterns in emotionally-disordered, antisocial or maltreated youth while controlling for the effects of each other factor. This is the rst study to attempt to disentangle the inuences of emotional problems, CU traits, maltreatment, and conduct problems on emotion recognition processes. An important methodological issue in teasing out multiple interacting variables is sampling such that adequate and equal variance can be obtained on each variables of interest; that is, sampling from a population where the constructs of maltreatment, emotional problems, antisocial behaviour and CU traits are meaningful and adequately distributed. Selecting on one of these variables alone (e.g., an abused group or incarcerated antisocial group) would potentially not capture adequate variance on the other two variables, or skew the results toward one or more of the constructs. We thus selected from a population of high-risk adolescents who were highly likely to show adequate base levels and variance on each of the constructs, without being specically selected for the presence of any of them; the participants were adolescents attending in-patient treatment for general mental health and substance abuse problems. To summarize, emotion recognition appears to differentiate different subtypes of psychopathology. For example, antisocial children and adolescents have been shown to be heterogeneous groups whose behaviours develop along a number of different trajectories that differentially involve environmental (e.g., maltreatment) and temperamental (e.g., CU traits) risks. Distinguishing between these trajectories allows for the delineation of subgroups of antisocial individuals and may enable the development of efcacious specialized interventions. The temperamental characteristic of emotionality has emerged as a useful point of distinction between groups, with low and high emotional groups exhibiting distinct correlates, different patterns of antisocial behaviour, and
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distinctive emotion recognition processes. The presence of CU traits has been linked with impairments in fear recognition, possibly affecting the development of empathy. In antisocial children without CU traits, emotionally-disturbed and maltreated samples, there is mixed evidence that anger cues are attended to at the expense of other emotional cues or that ambiguous cues are interpreted as indicators of threat. It was hypothesized that CU traits would show a unique relationship with a selective impairment in the recognition of fear. It was expected that antisocial scores would be associated with a decreased ability to recognize anger and a hostility bias, where neutral expressions would be labelled as angry. Finally, both the presence of maltreatment and emotional problems were expected to be associated with increased accuracy in the recognition of anger.

Method Participants
Participants were 23 adolescents (74% male), 1618 years of age (M = 16.61, SD = 0.58) who were receiving treatment for mental health and substance abuse issues at a residential rehabilitation programme (The Ted Noffs Foundation) in Sydney, Australia. The participation rate was 88 per cent of those approached. Sixty-one per cent of the participants were Caucasian, 26 per cent were Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander, and 13 per cent were of other backgrounds (e.g., Chinese, Samoan or Jamaican). Participants were self-referred or referred from a variety of sources, including the Department of Juvenile Justice and drug detoxication units around NSW. Eligibility for the substance abuse programme is assessed on an individual basis, however, young people were eligible if they were 18 years old or younger, scored at least three on the DSM-IV criteria for substance dependence, were referred to the programme voluntarily, and were motivated to remain in the programme. Exclusion criteria included a recent history of serious violent or sexual offending, a serious risk of harm to self or others, and psychotic mental illness. Priority was given to people who were younger, were at imminent risk of harm, were homeless, were currently in withdrawal units, or who had a co-morbid mental illness (e.g., conduct problems, anxiety, depression) that was able to be managed within the programme. For participation in the study, any drug use on the day of testing was also an exclusion criterion. Research in the area of child and adolescent psychopathology requires the use of multiple informants when measuring clinical phenomena (Piacentini, Cohen, & Cohen, 1992). For this reason, participants counsellors were asked to provide ratings of their clients on several measures. Participants in the programme received a minimum of two hours of individual counselling each week and the counsellors were assumed to have a reasonable knowledge of their clients personality and behaviour. In addition, counsellors were asked to provide condence ratings for their responses to account for potential variability in the counsellors knowledge of their clients and their history.

Measures
The constructs of antisocial behaviour, emotional problems, and CU traits were measured using the method described by Dadds, Fraser, Frost and Hawes (2005), in which reliable emotional problems, antisocial behaviour and CU factors are produced by combining the items from the Antisocial Process Screening Device (APSD; Frick & Hare, 2001) and the Strengths and Difculties Questionnaire (SDQ; Goodman, 1997). The APSD is a 20-item scale, where each item is scored 0 (not at all true), 1 (sometimes true), or 2 (denitely true). The CU dimension of the APSD has been shown to be the
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most stable dimension of the APSD across different samples (Frick, Bodin, & Barry, 2000). Both participant and counsellor reports were obtained where consent for counsellor report was given and the two forms were examined for convergence to assess validity. The SDQ is a measure of child psychopathology and yields a Total Difculties score as well as scores on ve subscales: hyperactivity, emotional symptoms, peer problems, conduct problems and pro-social behaviour. Participant and counsellor report forms of the SDQ were obtained where consent for counsellor report was given and the two versions were examined for convergence.

Maltreatment Index

This measure was adapted from the Maltreatment Classication System (MCS) devised by Barnett, Manly and Cicchetti (1993). The MCS differentiates between four types of child maltreatment: emotional maltreatment, neglect, physical abuse and sexual abuse. Several studies have demonstrated this distinction to be valid and reliable (Cicchetti & Toth, 2005). Due to ethical and theoretical considerations, sexual abuse was not assessed in the present study. The MCS provides operational denitions of the maltreatment subtypes and measures other characteristics of the abuse, such as onset, frequency and severity. For the purposes of the present study, only the lifetime incidence of emotional abuse, neglect, and physical abuse was recorded. Participants were asked to indicate whether they had experienced each type of maltreatment on a four-point scale, ranging from never to all the time. Participants counsellors lled out a counsellor report form of the Maltreatment Index, when participants consent for counsellor report was given. In order to gauge the counsellors condence in their responses, they were asked to rate their condence as low, moderate or high, based on their knowledge of the client and his or her history. The two versions were examined for convergence to assess validity.

The UNSW Facial Emotion Task (FACES) (Dadds, Hawes, & Merz, 2004) This task involves a PowerPoint presentation in which happy, sad, angry, fearful, disgusted and neutral expressions are displayed by a male and a female child, adolescent, and adult face, yielding a total of 36 presentations. The participant views the faces one at a time for two seconds each and, on a record form, marks the most appropriate emotion for each face. Accuracy was scored as a percentage correct score for each emotion. The task has been extensively validated across adolescent and adult samples and has previously been shown to be sensitive to accuracy differences in high CU and antisocial children (Dadds et al., 2006).

Procedure
Ethics approval was obtained from the University of New South Wales and the Ted Noffs Foundation. Participants were informed about the study and the voluntary nature of participating was explained. Principles of condentiality and anonymity were explained to those who agreed to participate, and informed consent was sought before participation commenced. There were two levels of consent in this study. Participants could give consent for their own participation, and at the conclusion of the study were asked whether their counsellors could complete some of the questionnaires on their behalf. Participants individual involvement in the study was not affected by whether or not they gave counsellor consent. All but two participants gave consent for their counsellors to participate. Participants were tested individually in a quiet room and were given the Facial Recognition Task. Consequently, they were asked to ll out the APSD, the SDQ and the Maltreatment Index. Each participants counsellor was asked to complete the APSD, the SDQ and the Maltreatment Index for each participant, provided the
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participant gave consent for the counsellor to do so. At the completion of the study, each participant was thoroughly debriefed to assess whether any distress occurred as a consequence of obtaining potentially sensitive information via the questionnaires. Participants were given the opportunity to ask questions and were thanked for their contribution to the study.

Results
The measurement of antisocial behaviour, emotional problems, and CU traits was highly reliable, with Cronbachs ranging from .73 to .84 on the self and counsellor reports. The Maltreatment Index demonstrated high reliability with a Cronbachs of .81 on the self report and .70 on the counsellor report. The self and counsellor maltreatment reports were correlated at r = .38; given the private and sensitive nature of this information, and the relatively brief period for which the counsellors had known some of the participants, this is a reasonable level of convergence and represents a medium effect size (Cohen, 1988). Mean levels and SDs between the reports did not differ signicantly, and the highest score counts method was employed with maltreatment scores (Piacentini et al., 1992), yielding a combined score that was used in all analyses. The distributions of all study variables are shown in Table 1. In order to check the validity of the high-risk sample selection, means and SDs are also presented for n = 22 16- to 17-year-old adolescents randomly selected from normative school samples from Sydney, Australia. As expected, use of the substance use sample was successful in sampling adolescents scoring at the high end of antisocial, emotional problems, and CU traits according to both self and counsellor reports. Hypotheses about the unique relationships of CU traits, emotional problems, maltreatment and antisocial behaviour to emotional recognition were tested by computing partial correlations between accuracy of identifying angry, sad, fearful and
Table 1. Ranges, means, and SDs of demographic and adjustment variables and emotional recognition accuracy in the current and a comparison sample
Current sample (n = 23) Range Mean SD Age Antisocial SR CU traits SR Emotion Probs SR Antisocial CR CU traits CR Emotion Probs CR Maltreatment SR Maltreatment CR Maltreatment Both Correct sad Correct happy Correct neutral Correct anger Correct fear Correct disgust 1618 316 112 28 621 211 010 18 19 19 12 22 12 12 12 12 16.61 10.04 4.91 5.17 13.95 7.29 5.43 3.65 4.53 4.83 1.70 2.00 1.83 1.96 1.70 1.52 0.58 3.88 2.84 1.77 4.32 2.70 2.65 2.10 1.87 1.95 0.47 0.00 0.49 0.21 0.47 0.67 Comparison sample (n = 22) Range Mean SD 1617 016 111 06 115 113 05 12 22 12 12 12 02 16.52 6.63 4.72 1.91 6.54 4.91 2.27 1.63 2.00 2.00 1.94 1.81 1.54 0.42 4.94 2.76 1.64 4.32 3.08 1.55 0.50 0.00 0.00 0.32 0.40 0.48

Notes: CU traits = CU traits scale combined from APSD and SDQ items; Maltreatment = Maltreatment Index; SR = self-report; CR = counsellor report; Free = free gaze condition of the FACES task.
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neutral faces and each of the antisocial, emotional problems, CU, or Maltreatment indices while controlling for the three remaining variables. The results of these analyses are displayed in Figure 1. As expected, the patterns of strengths and weaknesses in adolescents emotion recognition skills clearly differentiate across the dimensions of psychopathology and maltreatment. With the current sample size, correlations of r > .39 are signicant at the p = .05 (hypothesized one-tailed test) level, which is problematic given that previous research has found reliable associations between emotion processing and psychopathology in adolescents in the range of r = .25 to .40 (e.g., Dadds et al., 2006). Inferential signicance tests are thus incapable of detecting these smaller effect sizes with this sample size (Cohen, 1988). Thus, in what follows we present both traditional statistical signicance levels using one-tailed tests for theoretical predictions consistently found in previous research (Blair & Coles, 2000; Dadds et al., 2006). Correlations above 0.25 were noted if they corresponded to a theoretically-driven hypothesis. Unexpected correlations are presented only if statistically signicant using two-tailed tests. Figure 1 shows that, as expected, patterns of strengths and weaknesses in adolescents emotion recognition skills clearly differentiate across the dimensions of psychopathology and maltreatment. As hypothesized, a unique relationship was found between CU traits and fear recognition, where the presence of CU traits was associated with impaired recognition of fear (r = .27). Antisocial behaviour was positively associated with fear recognition (r = .49, p < .05), indicating better recognition of fear in those reporting higher rates of antisocial behaviour. As expected, antisocial behaviour was uniquely associated with an impairment in anger recognition (r = .31) and the impaired

0.40

Partial correlation

0.20 Emotion Anger Fear Neutral Sad

0.00

0.20

Antisocial

CU Dimension

Dep/Anx

Maltreat

Figure 1. Partial correlations of child adjustment and maltreatment with accuracy of emotion
recognition.
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recognition of neutral faces (r = .26). To examine the hypothesis that neutral faces would be labelled as angry by antisocial youth, the neutral face recognition errors were examined. The most common errors in neutral face recognition were to rate them as sad (44% of the errors) or angry (40% of the errors) faces. Maltreatment was uniquely and positively associated with recognition of sad (r = .39, p < .05) and fearful (r = .39, p < .05) faces, where higher levels of maltreatment corresponded with better recognition of sadness and fear. Contrary to hypotheses, there was no relationship between maltreatment and recognition of angry expressions. Emotional problems were associated with better recognition of sad (r = .48, p < .05) and angry (r = .43, p < .05) faces and poorer recognition of neutral faces (r = .28); neutral faces were most commonly perceived as angry (35%) and sad (34%) by highly maltreated children.

Discussion
The results from this high-risk adolescent sample extend previous ndings with community (Blair & Coles, 2000; Frick et al., 2005) and clinic-referred (Pollack et al., 1997) samples. Specically, emotional problems, CU traits, antisocial behaviour, and early maltreatment were demonstrated to each have a distinct relationship with emotion recognition in adolescents. Attempts to differentiate patterns of psychopathology in childhood have had limited success. Categories of clinical presentation can be reliably differentiated by their presenting symptoms (e.g., anxiety disorders, conduct disorder, depression, ADHD). However, scientists have largely failed in identifying specic risk and protective factors that differentiate between different pathways into psychopathology. Hence, emerging ndings about the specicity of emotion processing styles to various psychopathologies are encouraging. The analyses supported several of the key hypotheses. As expected, there was a unique relationship between CU traits and fear recognition, indicating that CU individuals displayed impairments in fear recognition regardless of their involvement in antisocial behaviour or their experience of maltreatment. This is consistent with previous research that has found a unique contribution of CU traits to impairments in fear recognition. That is, CU traits appear to drive the problems with fear recognition independent of levels of other behavioural problems in the child (Dadds et al., 2006). There are possible explanations for how decits in fear recognition operate. The recognition of other peoples fear (and sadness) can act as punishment cue, functioning to inhibit hurtful aggressive behaviour (Blair & Coles, 2000). Failure to recognize fear faces implicates dysfunction of the limbic/amygdala system for registering fearful emotional stimuli and learning to avoid aversive consequences (e.g., Blair, 2003; Davis & Whalen, 2001). This neural system is also responsible for regulating attention to the high concentration of communicative information available in other peoples eyes (Adolphs et al., 2005) and failure to recognize fear, an emotion largely communicated through the eyes, may be a marker for failure to develop empathy and theory of mind in young children (e.g., Dadds et al., 2006; Skuse, 2003). Also concordant with predictions was our nding that antisocial individuals showed unique impairments in the recognition of anger and frequently labelled neutral expressions as angry. This is consistent with Dadds et al.s (2006) study and Dodge et al.s (1990, 1995) proposition that misinterpretation of ambiguous cues as hostile cues facilitates the selection of an aggressive response to these cues. Furthermore, it is consistent with Dodge et al.s (1990) conclusion that hostile attribution biases are a marker of reactive, rather than proactive, aggression. Antisocial, high-CU individuals are more likely to engage in proactive aggression than antisocial low-CU individuals (Frick,
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Cornell, Barry, Bodin, & Dane, 2003). Theoretically, the proactive element of antisocial behaviour is removed by partialling out the contribution of CU traits, suggesting that the relationship between antisocial behaviour and anger recognition in the current sample is largely due to the reactive component of antisocial behaviour. The distinct emotion recognition processes experienced by antisocial CU and non-CU groups provides further support to the delineation of groups based on the presence or absence of CU traits. Emotional problems were uniquely associated with better recognition of angry and sad faces and decits in recognizing neutral faces. The latter were predominantly categorized as angry and sad. This is consistent with an emerging literature showing that emotional problems are associated with increased attention to emotional or threatening stimuli (e.g., Hadwin et al., 2006) but inconsistent with other studies showing a generalized decit for emotion recognition in depressed and anxious adolescents (Easter et al., 2005; Pine et al., 2004). The likely difference here is that the current study operationalized emotional problems as a dimensional variable in an otherwise quite seriously disturbed and co-morbid group, and controlled for the inuence of maltreatment and other dimensional of disturbance. Thus, the current results are likely to show the pure association of emotional problems to emotion recognition. Previous studies have typically compared an anxiety or depressive disorder group to normative controls and so some of the effects could be due to co-morbidity and maltreatment histories. The present sample showed improved fear and sadness recognition as levels of maltreatment increased. This contributes to Pollack et al.s (2001) ndings that maltreated children were superior to non-maltreated children in recognizing specic negative emotions. The relationship between the experience of maltreatment and recognition of fear and sadness is also consistent with Pollack et al.s (1997) conclusion that maltreated children are more accurate at recognizing negative, rather than positive, emotions. However, contrary to predictions, no relationship between maltreatment and anger recognition was found. This must be considered with reference to methodological differences between the current and earlier studies. First, Pollack and colleagues (Pollack, Cicchetti, Hornung, & Reed, 2000; Pollack et al., 1997, 2001) examined emotion recognition in children with a maximum mean age of nine years. It is possible that greater accuracy in anger recognition in maltreated children stems from the recent nature of their maltreatment experiences, where angry expressions could still serve as salient emotional cues. In the present sample, the participants were seldom at current risk of parental maltreatment. Rather, their superior performance at recognizing sadness and fear may stem from a more extensive personal experience of these emotions and thus a better ability to recognize them in others. It is possible that the relationship between maltreatment and anger recognition found in prior research was confounded by the inuence of conduct problems on emotion recognition. Impaired anger recognition and a hostility bias were evidenced in our antisocial participants, whereas maltreatment had a strong unique relationship with recognition of fear and sadness. This is not inconsistent with Dodge et al.s (1995) social information-processing theories but rather suggests that information-processing errors such as the hostile attribution bias are more likely to be present in maltreated individuals who are also antisocial, and may not be a necessary consequence of maltreatment alone. The unique effects of maltreatment on emotion recognition suggest that an elevated level of depression or anxiety is likely to have been found in this sample. This assertion is supported by the nding that antisocial behaviour was related to improved fear recognition and a sadness bias in neutral face recognition. It is possible that as antisocial behaviour increased, levels of anxiety or depression also increased, resulting in the observed emotion recognition processes. Although it is highly feasible that the current
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sample had high rates of mood and other disorders, there appears to be no evidence in the literature to suggest that psychopathology is related to specic emotion recognition processes. Certainly it is an interesting direction for future research to pursue. These ndings must be considered in light of several methodological issues. The relatively small sample size was not a problem for detecting the medium effect sizes we predicted, however, signicance levels were not used to conrm their statistical reliability. While this study presents a useful starting point for investigating the unique contributions of CU traits, antisocial behaviour and early maltreatment to emotion recognition processes, a larger sample would increase power to reliably detect smaller effect sizes (Cohen, 1988). Participants were recruited from a substance abuse treatment facility in order to deliberately sample high levels of maltreatment, antisocial behaviour and CU traits without specically selecting for one or more of them. This selection strategy appeared to bear fruit as ranges were extensive and hypothesized relationships were conrmed. However, it is unclear whether these relationships would generalize to other low risk or non-substance-use populations. A useful direction for future research may be the examination of the relationship of substance abuse with emotional recognition and behavioural adjustment. The ndings from the current study suggest that problems recognizing emotion in other people varies according to the child characteristics and their history of maltreatment. These differences in emotion processing are in the early stages of being delineated; however, there are emerging implications for clinical interventions. Chang, Schwartz, Dodge and McBride-Chang (2003) highlight the importance of targeting emotional regulation processes in at-risk youth, as low or highly reactive emotionality appears to be a common factor underlying a variety of maladjustment problems. Emotional awareness may actually be a protective factor that can be enhanced in those with particular temperamental traits or adverse parenting environments (Frick & Morris, 2004). Furthermore, interventions could be targeted not only at the youth themselves, but in a preventative manner by addressing parenting strategies (Chang et al., 2003; Hawes & Dadds, 2005). An emerging direction is the growing evidence that everyday parental conversational style has a large impact on the development of emotion knowledge in young children and that the childs emotional skills are responsive to parental training interventions (e.g., Reese & Cleveland, 2006). The current ndings contribute to the literature on emotion recognition processes in at-risk samples. This was the rst study to examine the unique relationships of CU traits, emotional problems, maltreatment and antisocial behaviour to recognition of specic emotions. We proposed and showed that emotion processing styles can reliably differentiate the presence of maltreatment and child traits. It is likely that the childs vulnerability to specic emotion processing styles is a potential mechanism through which more distal causes exert their inuence on current behaviour. We argue that this provides a promising direction for future research, where these variables can be examined prospectively to clarify their role as mechanisms underlying antisocial behaviour and other forms of psychopathology.

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