Study Claims Babies Can Show Callous And Unemotional Behaviours

Scientists have claimed they can tell if a baby will grow up to be an unemotional trainwreck just by checking if they prefer to look at a human face, or an inanimate object, such as a ball.

Yes, yes they have. And I know what you’re thinking… cure for cancer, obesity crisis, starving children.

No, no “” money is way better spent on testing babies’ emotional abilities. Yep.

Ok rant over, on with the story.

So, the scientists at King’s College London, the University of Manchester and the University of Liverpool used their time to study babies’ reactions to faces and objects, to see how they responded emotionally.

Their conclusion: that infants that prefer to look at a person’s face have low levels of callous and unemotional (CU) behaviours…

While those that prefer to look at a a ball apparently show impaired emotion recognition, reduced responsiveness to others’ distress and had a lack of guilt or empathy.

Does it mean they will grow up to be a psychopath?

Not likely.

Although, according to Dailymail.co, Limbs-in-the-Loch murderer William Beggs, the Dunblane mass killer Thomas Hamilton, and the Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik, are all known to have displayed psychopathic traits, though the researchers warn they are ‘extreme’ examples.

Are you checking your baby’s preference to your face and ball now?

Don’t worry, remember they said extreme examples!

For the study, researchers recorded the responses of a random sample of 213 mothers and babies, drawn from a population-based sample of 1,233 first-time mothers.

Infants’ preferential face tracking at five weeks and maternal sensitivity at 29 weeks were used as predictors of CU traits at two-and-a-half years.

The researchers explored whether babies preferred to look at a human face or a red ball and found that babies who preferred the ball were more likely to display CU traits.

“We found that increased preference for a person’s face -rather than a ball – at just five-weeks of age was associated with lower callous unemotional traits,” Lead author of the paper, Dr Rachael Bedford of the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College, London, told Dailymail.co.

“We also found that if a mother responds more sensitively to their baby during playtime, then the child is less likely to display callous unemotional behaviour as a toddler.

“We are the first to find this and others will need to confirm it before it can inform how we support families.”

What’s the relevance?

The study is published in the journal Biological Psychiatry and Dr Bedford said: “It is very important to emphasise that this study assessed these traits in young children.”

“We do not yet know about the stability of these behaviours i.e, whether high callous unemotional traits measured in toddlerhood remain high into adolescence and beyond, nor do we know how strongly early callous unemotional traits predict later behaviours.”

The researchers say an important area for future research will be to extend the current approach by assessing the overlap with co-occurring disorders such as ADHD – and disorders with shared symptoms such as autism spectrum disorder, which is characterised by social interaction difficulties including atypical attention to faces.