Bradley White
University of Alabama, AL·Psychology
Some young children show callous-unemotional (CU) traits: little guilt or remorse, low empathy and shallow emotions. These traits mirror the emotional core of adult psychopathy.
- Fields
Psychology
Medicine & Clinical Research
Neuroscience
- Topics
callous-unemotional traits
CU traits
psychopathy
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jul 2027
What they work on
- Test whether Facial Affect Sensitivity Training (FAST), a computerized feedback-and-incentive program, improves recognition of fearful and sad faces in children with elevated callous-unemotional traits, in a randomized trial of 30 children versus no treatment.
- Measure secondary signs of target engagement, including heightened eye gaze toward distress cues and changes in neural activity, and compare individual growth rates between FAST and control children.
- Determine the optimal number of FAST sessions by tracking when facial emotion recognition improves most, when gains peak or decay, and how satisfied children are with session frequency and length.
- Replicate target engagement in a new trial of 50 high-CU children, comparing FAST with implicit eye gaze training, and test feasibility, preliminary efficacy and downstream reductions in CU traits.
More about the research
They strongly predict early, persistent and severe misbehavior, and children with them respond less well to standard treatments for disruptive behavior. Leading theories hold that these children pay less attention to, and are worse at recognizing, other people's signs of distress, such as fearful or sad faces. They do, however, respond normally or strongly to rewards. This project tests whether training that sensitivity directly can change the traits themselves.
Why it matters
Children with callous-unemotional traits are at high risk for violent and antisocial behavior and often benefit less from existing treatments. If training children to recognize fear and sadness in faces both improves that skill and reduces CU traits, a brief computerized intervention in early childhood could help interrupt the developmental path toward antisocial outcomes.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Nicholas Thomson
Virginia Commonwealth University, VA·Psychology
Test whether Elevate VR, a brief hospital-based virtual reality program teaching de-escalation, emotion regulation and gun safety, reduces firearm violence, re-injury and death in a randomized controlled trial of 360 violently injured youth and their caregivers.
Alexandra Bey
Duke University, NC·Neuroscience·Early-career
Confirm that less looking at social than nonsocial images goes with lower beta-1 and higher theta EEG brain rhythms in autistic preschoolers, using EEG recorded at the same time as automated eye-gaze tracking.
Jude Cassidy
University of Maryland, MD·Psychology
Test whether adding the Circle of Security – Parenting intervention to Early Head Start services reduces insecure attachment, physiological dysregulation and behavior problems, in a randomized trial of 249 parent-child pairs.
The school
University of Alabama: 22 labs on PI Pages, $221M a year on research, 235 research doctorates a year.
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