Department of Biostatistics and Health Informatics, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience, King's College London, London, UK.
Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience, King's College London, London, UK.
Dev Psychopathol. 2021 Oct;33(4):1220-1228. doi: 10.1017/S0954579420000449.
Research suggests an increased prevalence of callous-unemotional (CU) traits in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and a similar impairment in fear recognition to that reported in non-ASD populations. However, past work has used measures not specifically designed to measure CU traits and has not examined whether decreased attention to the eyes reported in non-ASD populations is also present in individuals with ASD. The current paper uses a measure specifically designed to measure CU traits to estimate prevalence in a large community-based ASD sample. Parents of 189 adolescents with ASD completed questionnaires assessing CU traits, and emotional and behavioral problems. A subset of participants completed a novel emotion recognition task (n = 46). Accuracy, reaction time, total looking time, and number of fixations to the eyes and mouth were measured. Twenty-two percent of youth with ASD scored above a cut-off expected to identify the top 6% of CU scores. CU traits were associated with longer reaction times to identify fear and fewer fixations to the eyes relative to the mouth during the viewing of fearful faces. No associations were found with accuracy or total looking time. Results suggest the mechanisms that underpin CU traits may be similar between ASD and non-ASD populations.
研究表明，自闭症谱系障碍（ASD）儿童的冷酷无情（CU）特征更为普遍，对恐惧的识别能力与非 ASD 人群相似。然而，过去的研究使用的测量方法并非专门用于测量 CU 特征，也没有研究非 ASD 人群中报告的对眼睛的注意力减少是否也存在于 ASD 个体中。本研究使用专门用于测量 CU 特征的测量方法，来估计在大型基于社区的 ASD 样本中的患病率。189 名 ASD 青少年的父母完成了评估 CU 特征、情绪和行为问题的问卷。部分参与者完成了一项新的情绪识别任务（n = 46）。测量了准确性、反应时间、总注视时间以及对眼睛和嘴巴的注视次数。22%的 ASD 青少年的得分高于一个临界值，这个临界值是用来识别 CU 得分前 6%的。CU 特征与识别恐惧的反应时间较长以及在观看恐惧面孔时对眼睛的注视次数较少有关，而与准确性或总注视时间无关。结果表明，ASD 和非 ASD 人群中 CU 特征的潜在机制可能相似。
