Social and emotional detachment in Dutch children

Characteristics associated with psychopathy were, along with the symptoms of aggressive and antisocial behaviour, rated by parents in a community sample of 2535 four-to-eighteen-year-old Dutch children in 2003. lysis of principal components suggested two dimensions of psychopathic characteristics. The first dimension comprised egocentric characteristics and the second unemotional characteristics. Regression analyses further showed that antisocial behaviour could be predicted by egocentric characteristics, while aggressive behaviour could be predicted by the interaction of egocentric and unemotional characteristics. id unnecessary stigmatisation of youngsters, it is proposed to label the egocentric dimension as the ‘social detachment’ factor and the unemotional dimension as the ‘emotional detachment’ factor.