Primary and secondary variants of juvenile psychopathy differ in emotional processing

TLDR

Psychopathy can be divided into low‑anxious primary and high‑anxious secondary variants, a distinction that may clarify antisocial youth with callous‑unemotional traits. The study aimed to separate adolescent offenders into primary and secondary psychopathy variants based on anxiety levels. The authors applied model‑based cluster analysis to 165 male adolescent offenders with high Youth Psychopathic Traits Inventory scores. Secondary, high‑anxious offenders exhibited more abuse history, greater emotional and attentional problems, and increased attention to distressing images, whereas primary, low‑anxious offenders were unresponsive to such stimuli; neither group differed significantly from nonpsychopathic controls, indicating distinct etiological pathways for the two variants.

Abstract

Abstract Accumulating research suggests that psychopathy can be disaggregated into low-anxious primary and high-anxious secondary variants, and this research may be important for understanding antisocial youths with callous–unemotional traits. Using model-based cluster analysis, the present study disaggregated 165 serious male adolescent offenders ( M age = 16) with high scores on the Youth Psychopathic Traits Inventory into primary and secondary variants based on the presence of anxiety. The results indicated that the secondary, high-anxious variant was more likely to show a history of abuse and scored higher on measures of emotional and attentional problems. On a picture version of the dot-probe task, the low-anxious primary variant was not engaged by emotionally distressing pictures, whereas the high-anxious secondary variant was more attentive to such stimuli (Cohen d = 0.71). Although the two groups differed as hypothesized from one another, neither differed significantly in their emotional processing from a nonpsychopathic control group of offending youth ( n = 208). These results are consistent with the possibility that the two variants of psychopathy, both of which were high on callous–unemotional traits, may have different etiological pathways, with the primary being more related to a deficit in the processing of distress cues in others and the secondary being more related to histories of abuse and emotional problems.