See me give a presentation of this work here: https://upenn.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Embed.aspx?id=3c434e6a-cc9b-4e7e-ab72-abb0015e1d4e&autoplay=false&offerviewer=true&showtitle=true&showbrand=false&start=0&interactivity=all Abstract: Callous-unemotional (CU) traits (i.e., lack of empathy and guilt) predict risk for severe antisocial behavior (Frick et al., 2014). Understanding the etiology of CU traits is essential to inform treatments, including identifying modifiable mechanisms underlying the ability to respond to others’ feelings and perspectives. For example, typically-developing children are slower to take their perspective of a situation when another’s differing perspective is presented as well. This interference represents an unconscious mechanism to induce guilt when committing a wrong, and therefore dissuade antisocial behavior. Despite the fact that CU traits are marked by a lack of guilt, no prior studies have explored links between CU traits and automatic perspective taking (PT; Apperly, 2010). In a study of 7-10 year old children (N=25), children complete an APT task (Samson et al., 2010) and parents report on child CU traits using the Inventory of CU traits (Frick, 2004). Although the results were insignificant because of limited sample size and severity, there is evidence that previous research suggesting that PT is unimpaired in children with conduct problems have been using tasks that measure controlled PT only, limiting the scope of the results.