2016 Volume 67 Issue 1 Pages 1-12
Although conduct disorder (CD) is one of the most common mental health problems among children and adolescents, it still has a very heterogeneous diagnosis regarding its severity, course and presumed aetiology. Callous and unemotional (CU) traits has been focused as a specifier to designate a more severe and chronic subtype of CD. Studies regarding CU traits among children and adolescents have been conducted from multiple perspectives such as genetic, cognitive, emotional, biological and clinical. In addition, several reviews have offered comprehensive information about CU traits. However, most of those reviews focused not only on CU traits but also on psychopathic traits, mainly because the concept of CU traits was established relatively recently. There is no review of studies held in Japan. The aim of the current review is to offer comprehensive information about CU traits from relatively new studies which have investigated not psychopathy but exact CU traits. This review will also describe the Japanese studies of CU traits.
