Les perturbations de l'empathie sont au cœur des troubles des conduites de l'enfant et de l'adolescent

Taking a dimensional stance helps overcome the current debate on the utility and clinical validity of the diagnostic categories of disruptive behavior and conduct disorders in children and adolescents. This integrative perspective highlights the pivotal role that impairments in empathy processes are playing in conduct disturbances. The capacity for empathy encompasses three components: procedural, semantic and biographic. Both empirical and psychoanalysis studies confirm the association between empathy impairments and antisocial behaviours in children and adolescents. Neuroimaging, neuropsychological and social cognition studies, mainly conducted in adults, delineate some of the neural correlates of the empathy disturbances.