Callous and unemotional traits

Callous and unemotional traits, often shortened to CU traits, describe a persistent pattern of behavior marked by disregard for other people, a lack of empathy and generally deficient emotional response. The concept was first developed to measure the affective features of psychopathy in children, and the measures built for that purpose have since been validated in university samples and in adults. The traits are understood to arise from an interplay between genetic and environmental risk factors, and they may be expressed as a form of conduct disorder. Recognition in the diagnostic manuals is recent: a callous and unemotional specifier is included as a feature of conduct disorder in the fifth revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and in the eleventh edition of the International Classification of Diseases. This entry records the traits as a described clinical pattern, not as advice for diagnosis.