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Renewed attention is being paid to adolescents with callous-unemotional (CU) traits who enter the juvenile justice systems, and the DSM-5 recently added the “with limited prosocial emotions” specifier within the diagnosis of conduct disorder (DSM-5). These investigators prospectively studied 1215 boys (age range, 13–17; mean baseline age, 15; ethnicity: black, 37%; Latino, 46%; white, 15%) seen in association with their first arrests in three geographic regions of the U.S.
Participants, 184 of whom (15%) were rated as having high CU traits, were reassessed at seven visits over a 4-year period. Based on self-reports, 32% of those with high CU traits carried a gun (vs. 14% of those with low CU traits), and 22% used a gun at least once during c…