The Role of Early Emotion Impairments in the Development of Persistent Antisocial Behavior

Antisocial behavior that begins in childhood predicts chronic and serious antisocial behavior in adulthood. Antisocial children are impaired in how they perceive, experience, and regulate emotion, particularly fear and sadness, and the neurobiological systems that process aversive emotional information, particularly the stress response systems in the paralimbic system, are compromised. As a result, children may have a difficult temperament, impaired cognitive abilities, or different levels of emotional reactivity. These characteristics, in turn, increase the risk that children have poor social relationships and make decisions that increase the likelihood that their antisocial behavior becomes stable and pervasive. In this article, I clarify the role of emotion impairments in children's antisocial behavior. I also argue that investigating these emotional functions can help identify which children are more likely to persist in behaving antisocially and guide the development of new interventions.