Now, everyone who has ever had to deal with a 3-year-old will have had moments where you found yourself wondering if this child is crazy.
Whether or not a child can actually be a flat out psychopath is debatable, but a recent Australian study shows that traits associated with the condition can be spotted in kids from a very young age.
The recent study, conducted at the University of New South Wales, examined 214 girls and boys in preschools to see whether researchers could find callous and unemotional traits, which are often associated with psychopathy.
They did this by exposing the children to images that showed a variety of facial expressions, as well as both distressing and more neutral pictures.
Dr. Eva Kimonis, who led the study, found that children who possessed callous and unemotional traits had more difficulty recognizing facial expressions and were “less attentionally engaged by images of others in distress when co-occurring conduct problems presented.”
The finding showed that as many as one out of ten children showed such traits, which included lacking sympathy for others’ feelings.
This is what Dr. Kimonis herself had to say about the results of the groundbreaking study:
“Even very young children with these traits show that difficulty in recognizing emotions in others and they are also not engaged by other people’s emotions. When they see people in distress, it’s not capturing their attention in the same way as it would for the healthy population.”
The good news according to the doctor is that more research into this matter could help children who show a lack of emotion and empathy, as unemotional behaviours in children are known to be associated with an increased emotional burden on families as well as later criminality and antisocial behaviour.
