Details:
Please join us for our Spring Quarter installment of our Brown Bag Speaker Series, featuring a presentation by Dr. Eva Kimonis titled “Applying Basic Science Research to Enhance Violence Risk Assessment for Youth with Psychopathic Traits”
This event is free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be served.
Date:
Wednesday, April 19th, 2017
Time:
12-:00 – 1:00pm
Location:
University of California, Irvine campus
SBSG 3260
Abstract:
Much contemporary interest in psychopathy rests in its ability to predict severe antisocial and violent behavior. Antisocial youth with callous-unemotional (CU) traits exhibit a pattern of severe and persistent conduct problems that parallels adults with psychopathy. Basic science research aiming to understand causal factors underlying psychopathic and CU traits suggests distinct causal factors lead to their problem behaviors, specifically fearlessness and insensitivity to punishment and distress cues. These emotional deficits are present at multiple levels of processing from reduced fear-potentiated startle response to unique patterns of brain activity in response to images of others in distress (Fanti et al., 2016; Viding et al., 2012). At early stages of processing, distress cues fail to capture the attention of antisocial youth with CU traits, representing aberrant emotional attention. This presentation will discuss how combining laboratory measures of emotional processing with rater-based measures of CU traits may optimize the prediction of violence in this population. Implications for forensic practice will be discussed.
Speaker Biography:
Eva R. Kimonis, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor in the School of Psychology at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. She received her Master of Science and Doctor of Philosophy degrees in Applied Developmental Psychology from the University of New Orleans, with a specialization in developmental psychopathology and forensic psychology. Prof Kimonis’ program of research focuses on the development, assessment, and treatment of callous-unemotional traits and antisocial behavior in youth. Her research has been published in top peer-reviewed journals in the fields of forensic, clinical, and developmental psychology, and she has authored several book chapters on antisocial behavior in youth. She is the recipient of a Fulbright Scholar Grant from the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board, and the 2015 Early Career Contributions Award from the Society for the Scientific Study of Psychopathy.
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