Recently, the article entitled “Emotion Recognition in a Community Sample of Children: Unpacking the Contribution of Psychopathic Traits” was published in the journal Research on Child and Adolescent Psychopathology. The authors are Beatriz Díaz-Vázquez, María Álvarez-Voces, Carmen Sánchez-Vázquez, Estrella Romero, and Laura López-Romero, members of the UNDERISK research group.
This article constitutes the first publication derived from the ELISA Socioemotional project (https://underisk.gal/elisa-socioemocional/), a specific line of research within the longitudinal ELISA study (2017–present), which aims to examine emotional processing, expression, and recognition. This study, conducted between 2023 and 2024, involved a total of 239 boys and 199 girls aged between 8 and 12 years, who were attending the final years of primary education in 19 Galician schools located in the provinces of A Coruña and Pontevedra.
We currently know that psychopathic-like traits, which include interpersonal (e.g., narcissism and manipulation [GD]), emotional (e.g., low empathy and guilt [CU]), and behavioral dimensions (e.g., impulsivity and sensation seeking [INS]), are related to difficulties in emotion recognition, which leads children to experience greater difficulties in regulating their emotions and behaviors. These traits, together with conduct problems, although more prevalent and intense in clinical populations, are also found in community samples, making their assessment and intervention necessary.
Thus, the main objective of this study was to assess, in a sample of school-aged children, the accuracy and speed of emotion recognition, as well as the different attentional patterns toward key areas involved in decoding emotional information in human faces (eyes and mouth). Through a viewing task involving 40 faces of children and adults depicting the following emotions —happiness, fear, sadness, anger, and neutral— it was concluded that the psychopathy dimension characterized by low empathy (CU) was the only one associated with difficulties in emotion labeling, specifically for fear and neutral expressions, whereas the dimension related to narcissistic behavioral and personality traits (GD) recognized sadness more quickly. Regarding attentional patterns toward the eye and mouth regions, only marginal trends were found, indicating less time spent fixating on the mouth for fear and anger expressions.
These results highlight the importance of considering the three psychopathic traits differentially and the need to continue working on prevention and on the design of differential and specific strategies to enhance emotion recognition skills, in order to promote better psychological, emotional, and behavioral adjustment.
