| Sumario: | Callous-unemotional (CU) traits are associated with severe and persistent juvenile offending. CU traits are also associated with dampened emotional arousal, which suggests that fundamental frequency (f), a measure of vocally-encoded emotional arousal, may serve as an accessible psychophysiological marker of CU traits in youth. This study investigated the associations between f range measured during an emotionally evocative task, CU traits, and emotion dysregulation in a mixed-gender sample of 168 justice-involved youth. For boys, after controlling for covariates, wider f range—indicating greater emotional arousal—was negatively associated with CU traits and positively associated with emotion dysregulation. For girls, no significant associations with f range emerged; however, CU traits were positively associated with emotion dysregulation. Findings suggest that f range may serve as a valid indicator of CU traits in JJ-involved boys, and that detained boys and girls with high CU traits are characterized by different profiles of emotion dysregulation.
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