Abstract
Recent empirical work has suggested that youths with conduct problems and presenting high levels of callous-unemotional (CU) traits can be divided in two variants (i.e., primary, secondary) presenting specific characteristics and needs, but studies examining outcomes associated longitudinally with variants memberships remain scarce. Building on a previous investigation in which we identified variants of CU traits among children with conduct problems, we examined differences between groups on a wide range of behavioral/psychological, relational/social, and educational outcomes assessed during adolescence (n = 309, mean age = 17.4, SD = 0.96). When compared to those from the primary variant, youths from the secondary variant reported higher levels of conduct, opposition, attention deficit/hyperactivity and anxiety problems, had lower teacher-reported academic performance, experienced more conflictual relationships with their teachers, and were at higher risk of being victimized by their intimate partner. These results shed light on the specific clinical characteristics of children from the secondary variant that are likely to persist until adolescence. Providing these children with intensive preventive interventions targeting these long-term consequences could be particularly beneficial.
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Notes
All participants scored 0 on two items (use of heroin and use of glue/solvent), which prevented to compute the polychoric correlations of the Other drugs scale using these items. The two items were therefore removed for the computation of this ordinal alpha.
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Michèle Déry received funding from Grant 82694 from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and from Grant 435-2012-0803 from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
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Bégin, V., Mavungu-Blouin, C., Hamilton, M. et al. Primary and Secondary Variants of Callous-Unemotional Traits in Children with Conduct Problems: A Longitudinal Follow-up During Adolescence. Res Child Adolesc Psychopathol (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10802-024-01168-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10802-024-01168-y