Teenagers with serious conduct problems tended to show more callousness and less empathy a year later when their mothers reported the emotional features of psychopathy in themselves, such as not feeling bad about hurting others. This link held even after accounting for how callous the teens were at the start, and it was tied to this emotional dimension rather than to mothers’ manipulative, impulsive, or rule-breaking tendencies. The findings, published in Frontiers in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, point to caregiver personality as a possible marker of family risk, though the study cannot say whether genes, parenting, or both are responsible.
Conduct disorder is a mental health diagnosis given to children and teenagers who show a repeated pattern of breaking rules and violating the rights of others through behaviors such as fighting, stealing, lying, or destroying property. Within this group is a smaller set of young people who also display what psychologists call callous-unemotional traits. These include a lack of empathy, little guilt after doing something wrong, and shallow or muted emotional expression.
These traits tend to mark the most persistent cases. Young people with high levels of callous-unemotional traits are more likely to use aggression deliberately to get what they want, respond less to punishment, and face a higher risk of developing psychopathy as adults. Major diagnostic manuals now let clinicians add a label called “with limited prosocial emotions” to a conduct disorder diagnosis to flag these youth, and recent research suggests roughly one in five young people with conduct disorder qualify for it.
Where these traits come from does not fit neatly into nature versus nurture. Callous-unemotional traits are moderately to highly heritable, meaning a sizable share of the differences between young people can be traced to genetic differences. In a 2016 adoption study of 561 families, biological mothers’ history of severe antisocial behavior predicted callous-unemotional behaviors in their toddlers, even though the children were raised by adoptive parents and had little or no contact with their birth mothers. Adoptive mothers who often praised and rewarded their children, however, appeared to offer some protection against these behaviors.
Parenting itself also seems to play a part. A 2018 study of identical twins found that the twin who received harsher parenting tended to show more callous-unemotional traits and more aggression than the other twin. Because identical twins share the same genes, those differences within each pair point to an environmental influence. Taken together, this work suggests that a parent’s traits could relate to a child’s callousness through inherited tendencies, through the home environment, or through both at once.
The new study focuses on one parental characteristic in particular: psychopathic traits. Psychopathy is a personality pattern that researchers often divide into four facets. The interpersonal facet involves manipulation and deceit; the affective facet involves shallow emotions and a lack of empathy and guilt; the lifestyle facet involves impulsivity and thrill-seeking; and the antisocial facet involves rule-breaking behavior. The affective facet closely resembles the defining features of callous-unemotional traits in young people.
Earlier studies have linked parents’ psychopathic traits to callous-unemotional traits in their children, but most focused on younger children, relied on a single overall psychopathy score, and seldom accounted for how callous the child already was. Nicholas D. Thomson and Jessica J. James of Virginia Commonwealth University wanted to know whether mothers’ psychopathic traits predicted teens’ callous-unemotional traits a year later, beyond the teens’ starting levels, and whether any single facet stood out. They expected the affective facet to show the strongest link.
The researchers recruited 99 teenagers and their mothers through a large healthcare system in Virginia, for a total of 198 participants. All of the teens, who were between 13 and 17 years old with an average age of about 15 and a half, had already been diagnosed with conduct disorder by a licensed mental health professional. About 68 percent were boys. Sixty percent identified as Black or African American, 36 percent as white, and 4 percent as American Indian or Alaska Native.
The mothers, most of whom were the teens’ biological mothers, ranged in age from 29 to 68. Three fathers had also taken part, but the researchers excluded them because there were too few to analyze as a separate group. The data came from a larger project, funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, examining how fear responses relate to the development of callous-unemotional traits.
At the start of the study and again 12 months later, the teens completed a 24-item questionnaire measuring callous-unemotional traits. Mothers completed a 28-item questionnaire measuring their own psychopathic traits, with seven items for each facet. Sample items included having pretended to be someone else to get something (interpersonal), not feeling bad about hurting people (affective), doing something dangerous just for the thrill of it (lifestyle), and tricking someone into giving them money (antisocial).
The researchers used statistical models that accounted for the teens’ starting callous-unemotional scores, as well as the teens’ age, sex, and race and their mothers’ age. This approach asks whether mothers’ traits help predict where a teen ends up a year later beyond what could be predicted from where the teen started.
Callous-unemotional traits showed moderate stability over the year. Teens who scored higher at the start tended to score higher at follow-up, though the relationship was far from perfect, leaving room for change. Boys also tended to score somewhat higher than girls at follow-up.
The teens’ starting scores and demographic factors together explained about 21 percent of the variation in callous-unemotional traits a year later. Adding mothers’ overall psychopathy scores raised this to about 26 percent, with higher maternal scores linked to higher teen scores at follow-up.
When the researchers split psychopathy into its four facets, the model explained about 31 percent of the variation. Only the affective facet was linked to teens’ later callous-unemotional traits. The interpersonal, lifestyle, and antisocial facets were not statistically significant predictors once all four were considered together.
To give a sense of scale, with the other factors held constant, a mother scoring about four points higher on the affective items, which was roughly the typical spread among mothers in the sample, was associated with her teen scoring nearly four points higher at follow-up. The average teen score at follow-up was about 30.
The researchers also checked whether the pattern differed for boys and girls. Adding this set of comparisons as a group did not significantly improve the model’s predictions, which calls for caution. One specific comparison did stand out, however: the link between mothers’ affective traits and teens’ later callous-unemotional traits appeared among girls but not among boys. Girls made up only about a third of the sample, so this result will need confirmation in larger studies.
The findings are in line with research covered by PsyPost in 2022, which found that parents with more psychopathic traits tended to have adolescents with more callous-unemotional traits, partly through harsher and less warm parenting. That earlier study drew on a community sample of twins, whereas the new study followed teens already diagnosed with conduct disorder over the course of a year.
Thomson and James suggest that the emotional side of a mother’s personality, rather than manipulation, impulsivity, or rule-breaking, may be most relevant to whether callous traits persist or grow during adolescence. People high in affective psychopathic traits tend to show less empathy, take others’ perspectives less often, and have trouble identifying and describing emotions. Developmental theories propose that these are the same skills parents draw on to help children build empathy and a conscience, although the study did not measure parenting directly.
The authors also note that the sex difference might reflect something specific to mother-daughter relationships rather than girls being more sensitive to family influences in general. Because treatments that involve caregivers tend to work better for disruptive behavior problems than those focused on the child alone, the researchers suggest that assessing caregivers’ emotional traits could help clinicians understand a family’s risk, though they stop short of recommending specific interventions.
As with all research, there are some caveats to consider. The study shows an association over time, not a cause. Because most participating mothers were biological mothers, the link could reflect shared genes, the way mothers with these traits interact with their children, or a mix of both, and the design cannot tell these apart.
The mothers in the study were not diagnosed with psychopathy. The questionnaire measures traits along a continuum, and the analysis compared mothers who scored somewhat higher or lower on it. Both mothers and teens also reported on themselves, so their answers may have been shaped by how willing or able they were to describe their own emotions honestly.
The sample was relatively small, came from a single healthcare system, and included only teens already diagnosed with conduct disorder, so the results may not apply to teens in the general population. The study also did not measure whether the teens had experienced childhood maltreatment, which may contribute to callous-unemotional traits. The authors call for future studies that combine genetic information with direct observations of how parents and teens interact, and that include fathers, to clarify how caregiver personality and caregiving together shape these traits over time.
The study, “Maternal psychopathic traits prospectively predict youth callous-unemotional traits,” was authored by Nicholas D. Thomson and Jessica J. James.