Emotional Processing and Antisocial-Callous Behaviour

We are studying how children’s emotional development contributes to callous and disruptive behaviour problems.

We use the emotional pictures dot-probe task to measure patterns of emotional attention in youth. The dot-probe task is a spatially oriented motivated attention task that is administered via computer to capture attentional bias toward emotional cues, such as images from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS). This task has primarily been used to examine atypical patterns of emotional attention in anxious individuals, with more recent use to understand how attention to emotion is related to aggressive and disruptive child behaviour. The emotional pictures dot-probe task presents a series of picture pairs of varied emotional content, such as negative (e.g., barking dog, crying child), positive (e.g., kittens), and neutral (e.g., book) emotion. The dot-probe task is typically modified in terms of specific emotional content based on the focus of a given investigation.

Please contact Dr. Kimonis if you are interested in obtaining a copy of the emotional pictures dot-probe task.