Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Impact Of Callous-Unemotional Traits And Externalizing Tendencies On Neural Responsivity To Reward And Punishment In Healthy Adolescents, Yonglin Huang, Tingting Wu, Yu Gao, Yuyang Luo, Ziyan Wu, Shawn Fagan, Stephanie Leung, Xiaobo Li

Publications and Research

Both externalizing behavior and callous-unemotional (CU) traits in youth are precursors to later criminal offending in adulthood. It is posited that disruptions in reward and punishment processes may engender problematic behavior, such that CU traits and externalizing behavior may be linked to a dominant reward response style (e.g., heightened responsivity to rewards) and deficient punishment-processing. However, prior research has generated mixed findings and work examining both the sole and joint contribution of CU traits and externalizing problems related to functional brain alterations is lacking. In this pilot functional magnetic resonance imaging study, we measured externalizing behavior and CU traits in …