Facial Affect Sensitivity Training for Young Children With Callous-unemotional Traits
Public ClinicalTrials.gov record NCT04159168. Field values are reproduced from the official study page; the official ClinicalTrials.gov record remains the source of truth for eligibility, enrollment, and contact information.
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Official title
Facial Affect Sensitivity Training for Young Children With CU Traits
Brief summary
Reproduced verbatim from the official ClinicalTrials.gov record. Not medical advice.
The goal of this study is to test a novel intervention for children ages 6-11 with elevated callous-unemotional (CU) traits. Conduct problems are among the most prevalent and costly mental health conditions of childhood, and a common antecedent to adult psychiatric disorders. An established risk factor for early, persistent, and severe youth misconduct is the presence of CU traits. CU traits (e.g., lack of empathy or guilt, shallow affect) are analogous to the core affective features of adult psychopathy, interfere with child socialization, and predict poorer outcomes, even with well-established treatments for disruptive behavior disorders. Thus, novel intervention approaches are needed to target CU traits. Youth with elevated CU traits show deficits in facial emotion recognition (FER) for distress-related expressions, particularly fear or sadness. The central hypothesis is that impaired sensitivity for emotional distress cues (fear and/or sadness) is mechanistically linked to CU traits in children, and that, by targeting affect sensitivity directly, intervention can exert downstream effects on CU traits. A gap in the field regards how to remediate these neurocognitive deficits. This project will directly target affect sensitivity in high-CU youth. The investigators propose an experimental therapeutics approach to develop a novel neurocognitive intervention for CU traits, in which a clearly identified target, facial affect sensitivity (FAS), will be engaged and assessed via primary (distress FER accuracy and/or heightened eye gaze) and secondary (electroencephalograph event-related potential) neurocognitive and behavioral processes. If investigators can demonstrate engagement of the target (FAS) in the initial R61 phase, then in the R33 phase, this finding will be replicated with a new, larger sample, and feasibility and preliminary efficacy of FAST on CU traits will be examined. The long-term goal is to examine FAST impact on behavioral outcomes and to potentially apply this targeted intervention to the wider range of problems associated with CU traits.
Study identification
- NCT ID
- NCT04159168
- Recruitment status
- Completed
- Study type
- Interventional
- Phase
- Not applicable
- Enrollment
- 161 participants
Conditions and interventions
Conditions
Interventions
- Facial Affect Sensitivity Training (FAST) Behavioral
- Implicit Gaze Training task (Active control condition) Behavioral
Behavioral
Eligibility (public fields only)
- Age range
- 6 Years to 11 Years
- Sex
- All
- Healthy volunteers
- Healthy volunteers not accepted
This page does not interpret eligibility. Detailed inclusion and exclusion criteria are on the official ClinicalTrials.gov record.
Study timeline
- Start date
- Feb 14, 2021
- Primary completion
- May 30, 2026
- Completion
- May 30, 2026
- Last update posted
- Jun 16, 2026
2021 – 2026
United States locations
- U.S. sites
- 1
- U.S. states
- 1
- U.S. cities
- 1
| Facility | City | State | ZIP | Site status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Center for Youth Development and Intervention (CYDI) | Tuscaloosa | Alabama | 35487 | — |
Site contact phone numbers, emails, and investigator names are intentionally not displayed here. Open the official ClinicalTrials.gov record for site contact information.
About this trial record page
- What this page shows
- Public field values for ClinicalTrials.gov record NCT04159168, including study identification, conditions, interventions, eligibility (age, sex, healthy volunteer), timeline, and U.S. site list.
- What this page does not do
- No medical advice, eligibility judgments, treatment recommendations, study quality scoring, or AI-generated medical summaries. No site contact phone numbers, emails, or investigator names.
- Where the data comes from
- Sourced from the official ClinicalTrials.gov public API. The official record is the source of truth.
- Last refresh
- Last update posted Jun 16, 2026 · Synced Sep 4, 2026
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Open the official record
The complete protocol, eligibility criteria, and contact information for NCT04159168 live on ClinicalTrials.gov.