L10 - Abnormal Development - Behavioural Disorder Flashcards
1
Q
Why is abnormal development important?
A
- Understanding abnormal behaviour helps understand normal behaviour (& vice versa)
- e.g. Language Delay - Can recognise abnormal development
- Early identification - Abnormal development is a risk for difficulties in adulthood so intervening earlier leads to…
- Better treatment outcomes
- Lessened impact on child
- Lessened impact on others
- Better value for money (impact of problems are less)
- As they get older moves away from affecting the self to impacting things such as social relationships
2
Q
What can we learn from studying antisocial behaviour problems in children?
A
- How best to help them
- The developmental trajectory of antisocial behaviour & the different ages
- Where, what and whom to spend government funding
- Social cognition
- Moral development
- Family dynamics
- Impulse control
- Reward and punishment systems
- Associative learning systems
- Attention systems
- Biology of aggression
- Genetic risk factors
- Environmental risk factors
3
Q
What is antisocial behaviour disorder?
A
- Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD)
- More in younger children
- 3/4 years
- Whether it is developmentally normal or not
- Conduct Disorder
- Things such as drugs, alcohol, truancy etc.
4
Q
What are children with antisocial behaviour disorder like? E.g. What are the different symptoms shown?
A
- Heterogenous
- HOT - aka - emotionally volatile
- Reactive aggression
- Comorbid anxiety (Typical for ODD)
- Low genetic risk
- High environmental risk
- COLD - Unemotional
- Reactive and proactive aggression
- Typically low anxiety
- About 1/3 children with ODD and CD
- High genetic risk
- Biological correlates
- Callous-unemotional traits (defined by personality traits but described by behaviours)
- Reduced empathy
- Low levels of guilt and shame
- Limited prosocial emotion
- Reduced Affect
5
Q
What does antisocial behaviour characterised by high levels of CU traits look like?
A
- Lack of empathy
- Small proportion of adults responsible for a large amount of actual crimes
- “I know what the effect of my actions are but I don’t care”
- Observational evidence they might lack empathy…
- Proactive aggression, bullying, reduced shame, reduced guilt
- Empirical evidence: deficits in experimental tests of empathy (Do you feel like the person in the story would feel?), emotion recognition deficits
6
Q
What are callous-unemotional traits theories? (name only)
A
- Study of empathy with psychopathic boys compared to autistic
- Low-fear hypothesis
- Punishment insensitivty hypothesis
- Amygdala Dysfunction
7
Q
What is the study of empathy with psychopathic boys for unemotional trait theories?
A
- Callous Unemotional - Affective empathy impairment
- ASD - Cognitive empathy impairment
- In HFASD - Explicit ToM is intact
- In HFASD - Implicit ToM is impaired
- High CU seem to be associated with an implicit deficit in empathy
8
Q
What is the low-fear hypothesis?
A
- A reduced ability to feel fear and thus a reduced influence on behaviour
- “I know what the effect of my actions are but I don’t care”
- Observational evidence they might have low levels of fear
- Insensitive to punishment, risky ‘impulsive’ behaviour, failure to recognise fear in others
- Evidence - Reduced conditioned fear-response
- Fear potentiated startle
- People with high levels of psychopathic personality traits have reduced conditioned-fear response (not accounting social behaviour)
Although have a normal unconditioned fear response and the same levels of subjective fear and discomfort as non-psychopaths - so they have some fear
9
Q
What is the punishment insensitivity hypothesis?
A
- Observational evidence → Respond poorly to punishment aspects of parenting interventions - don’t change behaviour, treatment failure in adult populations
- Empirical evidence → Poor passive avoidance learning, poor response reversal
- Neither children with high levels of CU traits nor adults with psychopathic personality traits are characterised by learning difficulties
- Acquisition is intact - can form associations
- Punishment only insensitive in the presence of rewards - evidence from response-reversal paradigms
- Perhaps punishment insensitivity is a partial explanation but it doesn’t explain other deficits such as poor emotion recognition
10
Q
What is amygdala dysfunction?
A
- Involved in…
- Emotion recognition and processing
- Associative learning
- Fear response
- Fear conditioning
- “Emotion centre”
- Autonomic and affective responses
- Empirical evidence says different things about the amygdala as a cause for CU - e.g. abnormally structured, smaller, overactive, underactive
11
Q
What is the problem with CU theories?
A
- No full explanation
- Only affective empathy
- Only conditioned-fear response
- Only punishment-insensitive in certain conditions
- Role of the amygdala is unclear
- Psychopathy and CU traits are subtle - Behaviours associated with them are not
12
Q
What are the three main replicated findings in CU research?
A
- Fear-recognition deficits
- Reliable finding - adults and children with or without antisocial behaviour
- Two important bits of data
- Dadds et al., 2006 “Attention to the eyes and fear recognition deficits in child psychopathy”
- Important as fear response is all conveyed in the eyes = communicates where danger/fear is
- Fear recognition and the brain
- Subcortical visual pathway (terminates in activation of the basolateral amygdala) directs gaze towards salient social stimuli (implicit fear recognition)
- Shift in gaze to attend to the eye-region of a fear face
- Activation of the central amygdala and explicit fear recognition
- Dadds et al., 2006 “Attention to the eyes and fear recognition deficits in child psychopathy”
- Poor response-reversal learning (passive avoidance)
- Intact acquisition but reduced ability to modify response in light of changing outcomes
- CU take longer to stop pressing button if stop getting rewards from it
- Punishment insensitive? Reward dominant?
- Does reward/punishment actually matter?
- Intact acquisition but reduced ability to modify response in light of changing outcomes
- Reduced conditioned fear response
- Asked to focus on threat or non-threat stimulus or gave no instructions
- When told to focus on the thing they found threatening, fear normalised
- Asked to focus on threat or non-threat stimulus or gave no instructions
13
Q
Why does a developmental approach fit?
A
- Psychopathy and CU traits are subtle
- Time is a crucial variable
- Sometimes you need a developmental approach to see whole picture
14
Q
What is a possible explanation of CU traits?
A
- Theory: The amygdala is differentially activated in people with high
levels of psychopathic personality traits - Specifically: The basolateral amygdala is under-activated and the
central amygdala functioning at normal, or above, level - Theory predicts…
- Basolateral amygdala is involved with the automatic allocation of attention
- Central amygdala is involved with explicit emotion recognition and the physiological fear response
- The basolateral amygdala encodes the specific features of stimuli (e.g. $1 versus $5)
- The central amygdala encodes the general valence of a stimulus (good versus bad, I want versus I don’t want)
- The learning parameters are different - basolateral part is more sensitive, central part doesn’t change
15
Q
Is a psychopath born or made?
A
- Evidence shows CU are highly heritable
- Researchers have identified two
- Primary Psychopathy
- Secondary Psychopathy
