NEW RESEARCH
Reduced Eye Gaze Explains “Fear Blindness” in Childhood Psychopathic Traits

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ABSTRACT

Objective

Damage to the amygdala produces deficits in the ability to recognize fear due to attentional neglect of other people's eyes. Interestingly, children with high psychopathic traits also show problems recognizing fear; however, the reasons for this are not known. This study tested whether psychopathic traits are associated with reduced attention to the eye region of other people's faces.

Method

Adolescent males (N = 100; age mean 12.4 years, SD 2.2) were stratified by psychopathic traits and assessed using a Tobii eye tracker to measure primacy, number, and duration of fixations to the eye and mouth regions of emotional faces presented via the UNSW Facial Emotion Task.

Results

High psychopathic traits predicted poor fear recognition (1.21 versus 1.35; p < .05) and lower number (1.85 versus 2.51; p < .001) and duration (375 versus 620 ms; p < .001) of eye fixations, and fewer first foci to the eye region (1.01 versus 2.01; p < .001). There were no differences in gaze indices to the mouth region. All indices of gaze to the eye region correlated positively with accurate recognition of fear for the high psychopathy group, especially the number of times that subjects looked at the eyes first (r = .50; p < .01).

Conclusions

Attention to other people's eyes is reduced in young people with high psychopathic traits, thus accounting for their problems with fear recognition, and is consistent with amygdala dysfunction failing to promote attention to emotional salience in the environment.

Section snippets

METHOD

The study was conducted in a private school in Sydney, Australia, after approval was obtained from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) Ethics Review and school boards. Participants were N = 100 boys ranging in age from 8 to 15 years (mean 12.4, SD 2.2) from relatively homogeneous middle to upper middle-class backgrounds, similar to the previous study of CU traits and eye gaze. Eighty-two percent came from two-parent families; parents' modal education level was the university level, and

RESULTS

First, we compared accuracy of emotion recognition by gaze condition and emotion type. There were main effects for gaze condition (F2,89 = 14.25; p < .001) and emotion type (F5,83 = 53.94; p < .001), which were qualified by an interaction between the two (F10,82 = 3.54; p < .001). Follow-up Bonferroni tests showed that fear and disgust were recognized less accurately than the other emotions and that disgust was significantly more poorly recognized in the eye gaze condition. This is consistent

DISCUSSION

These results show that CU traits, the personality dimension that specifies the subgrouping of psychopathy within AB, are associated with deficits in naturally occurring attention to the eye region of other peoples' faces. This deficit occurred independently of the emotion being portrayed by the target face, occurred across multiple and various indices of eye gaze, and was not associated with the other aspect of childhood adjustment or maladjustment (e.g., AB, anxiety/emotional problems). It

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    This research was supported by grant ID#300432 from the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia to the first author. We are grateful to all who participated in this study.

    This article is the subject of an editorial by Dr. Ami Klin in this issue.

    Disclosure: The authors report no conflicts of interest.

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