are underpinned by a fearless temperament and defi-
cient processing of emotionally distressing stimuli,
which causes insensitivity to socializing agents and
interferes with the typical development of conscience.
At the symptomatic level, Frick and his colleagues have
found that youths with traits of emotional detachment
tend to be fearless, thrill and adventure seeking, and
low in anxiety. At the pathophysiological level, they
have found that emotionally detached traits identify—
among a pool of youths with early and persistent
antisocial behavior—those who possess information-
processing and emotional deficits similar to those
found among psychopathic adults. These include
reduced sensitivity to cues of punishment when a
reward-oriented response set is primed and diminished
reactivity to threatening and emotionally distressing
stimuli. Although such results might be interpreted as
evidence that psychopathy is genetically influenced,
caution should be exercised in drawing premature
inferences because the heritability of these laboratory
variables is unclear.
Only one behavioral-genetic study of psychopathy
has been conducted with youths to date. In this study,
psychopathy was operationalized using teachers’ rat-
ings of C/U traits on an unvalidated but internally
consistent scale. Based on a selection of 661 7-year-
old probands with extreme C/U traits (>1.3 SD), the
authors found concordance rates of 39% and 73% for
dizygotic and monozygotic twins, respectively, yield-
ing an estimate of moderate heritability for C/U traits
(h=.67). Although observational studies suggest that
childhood maltreatment relates more strongly to anti-
social behavior than features of emotional detach-
ment per se, more research is needed to determine
whether features of emotional detachment are more
highly heritable.
In summary, existing research provides some sup-
port for the validity of emotional detachment or C/U
traits in defining juvenile psychopathy. The impor-
tance of these traits is bolstered by psychometric
studies. Studies that apply item response theory indi-
cate that interpersonal and affective items convey
more information about the underlying juvenile psy-
chopathy construct than items that tap aggressive and
antisocial conduct. Some of the recently developed
measures of juvenile psychopathy (e.g., the Youth
Psychopathic Traits Inventory; the Inventory of
Callous Unemotional Traits) focus on emotional
detachment, de-emphasizing antisocial behavior. It
remains for future research to determine whetherthese measures more “cleanly” assess the construct
than their predecessors.Malleability of Juvenile Psychopathy
The fact that we can reliably assess features of emo-
tional detachment in youths that relate in a theoretically
coherent manner to cognitive and affective deficits pro-
vides some support for extending psychopathy mea-
sures downward from adults to youth. Presently,
however, we lack the necessary collateral evidence that
what we are assessing in youths is psychopathy, a per-
sonality disorder that will remain stable into adulthood.
Scholars have expressed two main concerns about
the stability of juvenile psychopathy. First, downward
translations of the PCL–R include normative and tem-
porary features of adolescence such as impulsivity,
stimulation seeking/proneness to boredom, poor
behavior controls, and irresponsibility. At least one
study indicates that measures of juvenile psychopathy
correlate moderately with measures of psychosocial
maturity. To the extent that measures of juvenile psy-
chopathy tap construct-irrelevant variance related to
psychosocial maturity, a youth’s score will gradually
decrease as he or she matures. It is possible that recent
measures of juvenile psychopathy that focus specifi-
cally on emotional detachment may capture less
construct-irrelevant variance related to psychosocial
maturity. Indeed, a cross-sectional item-response the-
ory study indicates that PCL:YV items that assess
emotional detachment are more defining of psychopa-
thy across age groups than items that tap impulsive,
antisocial behavior.
The second concern is that there is no compelling
evidence that youths assessed as psychopathic will
mature into psychopathic adults. Because personality
and identity may not be well formed until adulthood,
our nosological systems generally forbid applying
diagnoses of personality disorders to children and
adolescents. Although psychopathic adults probably
manifested similar traits when they were younger, rel-
atively few youths with psychopathic features may
mature into psychopathic adults. Reasoning by anal-
ogy, the majority of children with conduct disorder
desist acting out and do not mature into adults with
antisocial personality disorder.
Three relevant studies have been conducted. In the
first, the APSD was repeatedly administered to 100
nonreferred fourth graders. Across a 4-year period, the
stability of APSD scores and rank order was excellent440 ———Juvenile PsychopathyJ-Cutler (Encyc)-45463.qxd 11/18/2007 12:43 PM Page 440