Individual differences in psychopathic traits and identifying mental states and emotions in others

Psychopathy has gained interest as a research topic in recent years due to the devastating effects it has on society and the failure of traditional rehabilitation techniques to work. Of particular interest is the identification of early indicators of psychopathy in children who may be more susceptible to treatment. There are three distinct factors to psychopathy in childhood-antisocial behaviour, callous-unemotional traits, and narcissism-and it is unclear if these traits exist in various degrees in non-clinical samples and if each factor relates to unique deficits. This study examined how individual differences in these psychopathic traits in typically developing children relate to their competence in identifying both emotional and non-emotional mental states in others. Forty-three children from the Greater Vancouver Area aged 6 to 11 (M = 8yrs 3mos, SD = 1yr 5mos) participated (23 boys, 20 girls). The participants completed an emotion recognition task, a mental state identification task, and an intelligence measure. The parents of the participants completed two well-validated measures of psychopathy in children. The results revealed no relationship between individual differences in these traits and the identification of non-emotional mental states or the overall ability to correctly detect emotions in others. There was, however, a diminished ability to detect negative emotions in those with higher levels of callous-unemotional traits as well as a tendency to incorrectly attribute threat emotions for those with lower levels of psychopathy. These effects were found while controlling for the effects of age, gender, and intelligence. These findings are discussed in relation to current theories of psychopathy and potential avenues for future research.Arts, Faculty ofPsychology, Department ofGraduat

A systematic analysis of the 'Reading the Mind in the Eyes' task in children and what it means for understanding social perspective taking

How well we understand social perspective taking is intricately linked to how well we assess this ability; however, there are factors that can influence its assessment, altering how we conceptualize social perspective taking and its development. The goal of the current dissertation was to systematically analyze one of the most popular measures of social perspective taking in children, the Reading the Mind in the Eyes task, by examining three specific measurement issues—what is being measured, response format, and coding scheme—to determine how these issues impact our understanding of social perspective taking more generally. Methods: Three studies were conducted with 249 children aged 4 to 13, including 54 children at-risk for affective perspective taking deficits. Two response formats (forced-choice vs. open-ended) and two coding schemes (term specific vs. valenced) were systematically compared on performance, relations to other abilities, and efficacy at measuring cognitive versus affective perspective taking. Comparison measures included dispositional empathy, cognitive perspective taking, and verbal ability. Results: There was a significant effect of response format, with the forced-choice format related to both cognitive and verbal abilities, suggesting that its performance is more apt to be influenced, unnecessarily, by the participants’ vocabulary knowledge or use of alternate strategies. Furthermore, the forced-choice format was unrelated to dispositional empathy and cognitive perspective taking and failed to differentiate typically-developing from at-risk children. In contrast, the open-ended format was significantly related to dispositional empathy and differentiated at-risk from typically-developing children. Taken together these results a) raise concerns about the use of the Reading the Mind in the Eyes task as a measure of cognitive perspective taking and b) reveal that an open-ended format provides a better measure of affective perspective taking than the forced-choice format. The effect of coding scheme was less clear, with evidence that term-specific coding was linked to vocabulary knowledge only in typically-developing children and only in a forced-choice response format. Implications: Findings are discussed in terms of implications on the type of information that can be gleaned from the Reading the Mind in the Eyes task and their relevance for studying social perspective taking more generally.Arts, Faculty ofPsychology, Department ofGraduat

Comparisons of an Open-Ended vs. Forced-Choice ‘Mind Reading’ Task: Implications for Measuring Perspective-Taking and Emotion Recognition

<div><p>Perspective-taking and emotion recognition are essential for successful social development and have been the focus of developmental research for many years. Although the two abilities often overlap, they are distinct and our understanding of these abilities critically rests upon the efficacy of existing measures. Lessons from the literature differentiating recall versus recognition memory tasks led us to hypothesize that an open-ended emotion recognition measure would be less reliant on compensatory strategies and hence a more specific measure of emotion recognition abilities than a forced-choice task. To this end, we compared an open-ended version of the <i>Reading the Mind in the Eyes Task</i> with the original forced-choice version in two studies: 118 typically-developing 4- to 8-year-olds (Study 1) and 139 5- to 12-year-olds; 85 typically-developing and 54 with learning disorders (Study 2). We found that the open-ended version of the task was a better predictor of empathy and more reliably discriminated typically-developing children from those with learning disorders. As a whole, the results suggest that the open-ended version is a more sensitive measure of emotion recognition specifically.</p></div

You seem certain but you were wrong before: Developmental change in preschoolers’ relative trust in accurate versus confident speakers

<p>Dataset for Brosseau-Liard, Cassels and Birch, "You seem certain but you were wrong before: Developmental change in preschoolers’ relative trust in accurate versus confident speakers" (PLoS ONE)</p

Comparison of performance on the <i>ET</i> (2a) and <i>GET</i> (2b) between the learning-disordered or typically-developing groups (Study 2).

<p>Comparisons between the two groups on the Eyes Task (<i>ET</i>; Figure S2a) and the Generative Eyes Task (<i>GET</i>; Figure S2b) show that although there is no difference in performance on the <i>ET</i>, there is a difference on the <i>GET</i>. Notably, the two groups were comparable in verbal ability (despite the learning-disordered group being older), suggesting that verbal ability is key to the <i>ET</i>, but not the <i>GET</i>. The difference between the two groups on the <i>GET</i> was statistically significant at p<.05. Error bars represent 2 SDs of standard error.</p

Comparisons between the ET and the GET in the typically-developing samples from studies 1 and 2.

<p>Note: ^aLevene’s Test for Equality of Variances was significant, F(65,56) = 4.23, p = .042, and thus a case 4 t-test was used; ***p<.001; ET = Original Eyes Task; GET = Generative Eyes Task.</p><p>Comparisons between the ET and the GET in the typically-developing samples from studies 1 and 2.</p

Simple slopes for predicted propensity to side with the confident individual by age.

<p>Simple slopes for predicted propensity to side with the confident individual by age.</p