The Role of Empathy in Disruptive Disorders in Early Childhood

Parent interventions are an effective method of improving a disruptive child's behavior. However, parent interventions are not effective with all disruptive children and an individual child's characteristics may determine whether they will benefit from parent training. For example, research has shown that disruptive boys who lack guilt and empathy do not benefit as much from parent interventions as do boys who have those qualities. It is known that disruptive children who lack empathy are at risk for severe anti-social behaviour and psychopathy. Therefore, it is important to identify these at-risk children and implement effective interventions. One way to distinguish this at-risk population is to identify markers of psychopathic traits in childhood. There is evidence to suggest that children and adults who lack empathy have underlying brain abnormalities. The amygdala is a brain region that is assumed to play a key role in fear-conditioning as well as emotional and social behaviour. Amygdala dysfunction has been linked to a lack of empathy in children and adults with psychopathic traits. Seeing other people in pain can arouse feelings of empathy. A way of measuring empathy in the brain is to test individuals using neuroimaging machines and measure their brain activity while showing them images of others in pain. In this study, images of people in pain will be shown to young children and their brain activity will be measured using magnetoencephalography (MEG). MEG is a tool used to measure brain function and because it is non-invasive, it is an ideal neuroimaging tool to use in young children. There are two major goals of this study. The first is to determine whether parent inventions are effective in boys and girls with disruptive behaviour who lack empathy. The second is to see whether boys and girls with disruptive behaviour have different brain activity in the amygdala, than do disruptive boys and girls who are empathetic.