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Parents’ identification and discussion of their own and their children’s emotions are important emotion socialization behaviors (ESBs) that may mitigate child conduct problems (CPs). However, if parents perceive their child to be relatively unemotional, which may be the case for children with conduct problems and high callous–unemotional traits (CP + CU), these parents may be limited in their capacity to use ESBs effectively. This study tested these questions by looking at ESBs in mothers (N = 145) of children aged 2–8 years with CP + CU (n = 24), CPs and low CU traits (CP–CU; n = 94) and a non-clinical community sample (n = 27). After watching an emotional movie excerpt, mothers were asked to (1) provide ratings of their child’s emotional experience and then (2) engage in a debriefing task with their child about the content. Children’s expressed emotion during the excerpt and transcriptions of the debriefing task were coded by masked raters. Unexpectedly, mothers’ perceptions of their children’s emotion did not vary by group. Emotional ratings provided by mothers of children in the CP + CU group most closely aligned with ratings from independent observers. ESBs did not differ by group in the debriefing task. Mothers of children with CP + CU traits were shown in this study to be reliable reporters of their children’s expressed emotion and showed similar rates of parental ESBs as mothers of children in the other groups. Results are discussed in reference to various models of parenting and CU traits that might account for these unexpected findings.

Extensive research has associated adolescent delinquent behavior with verbal deficits, yet for some subgroups of youth offenders better verbal ability has been associated with increased risk. This study examined associations between specific oral language skills and established markers of high-risk youth offending comprising callous and unemotional (CU) traits, early age of the first offence, and violent offending. Measures of language, CU traits, anxiety, as well as official youth justice data, were collected for adolescent male offenders and non-offenders (n = 130; aged 13–19 years; 62% youth offenders). Pragmatic language was found to be differentially associated with distinct variants of CU traits based on high/low levels of anxiety. Furthermore, among youth offenders with primary variant (low anxiety) CU traits, more violent offending was associated with better structural language skills, while earlier age of first offence was associated with better pragmatic language skills.

This meta-analysis aimed to update existing data on the comparison of prevalence rates of psychopathology primarily among offspring with at least one parent with bipolar disorder (BD) and offspring of parents without psychiatric illness. Seventeen studies were derived from a systematic search of PsychInfo, Medline, Scopus and Embase. Inclusion criteria were use of a control offspring group, standardized diagnostic procedures and reporting of clear frequency data. Risk of psychopathology was estimated by aggregating frequency data from selected studies. Compared to control offspring, high-risk BD offspring are nine times more likely to have a bipolar-type disorder, almost two and a half times more likely to develop a non-BD affective disorder and over two times more likely to develop at least one anxiety disorder. High-risk offspring also showed a significant increased risk of other non-mood psychopathology such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), any type of behavioral disorder and substance use disorder (SUDs). Risk of developing a broad range of affective and non-affective psychopathology is significantly higher in high-risk BD offspring. Identifying clinical presentations of this genetically high-risk cohort is important in establishing appropriate preventative treatment.

Recent evidence suggests that epigenetic regulation of the DRD4 gene may characterise specific aspects of ADHD symptomology. We tested associations between ADHD symptoms and epigenetic changes to the DRD4 gene in DNA extracted from blood and saliva in N = 330 children referred for a variety of behavioural and emotional problems. ADHD was indexed using DSM diagnoses as well as mother, father, and teacher reports. Methylation levels were assayed for the island of 18 CpG sites in the DRD4 receptor gene. A nearby SNP, rs3758653, was also genotyped as it has previously been shown to influence methylation levels. There was high consistency of methylation levels across CpG sites and tissue sources, and higher methylation levels were associated with the major allele of SNP rs3758653. Higher methylation levels were associated with more severe ADHD independent of SNP status, tissue source, ethnicity, environmental adversity, and comorbid conduct problems. The association applied specifically to the cognitive/attentional, rather than hyperactivity problems that characterise ADHD. The results indicate that epigenetic regulation of the DRD4 gene in the form of increased methylation is associated with the cognitive/attentional deficits in ADHD.