Developing Cutoff Scores for the Inventory of Callous-Unemotional Traits (ICU) in Justice-Involved and Community Samples

ABSTRACT

Objective: The recent addition of the callous-unemotional (CU) traits specifier, “with Limited Prosocial Emotions (LPE),” to major classification systems has prompted the need for assessment tools that aid in the identification of elevations on these traits for diagnostic purposes. The goal of the current study was to use and evaluate multiple methods for establishing cutoff scores for the multi-informant questionnaire, the Inventory of Callous-Unemotional Traits (ICU).

Method: The present study compared the clinical utility of various proposed cutoff methods and scores (i.e., empirically derived cutoffs using receiver operating characteristic (ROC), normative cutoffs, and rational scoring approximations of LPE criteria) in both a longitudinal sample of justice-involved male adolescents (N = 1,216; M_age = 15.29, SD = 1.29) and a cross-sectional sample of school children (N = 289; M_age = 11.47 years; SD = 2.26).

Results: Methods resulted in a range of cutoff scores with substantial diagnostic overlap and validity. Specifically, they designated justice-involved adolescents at risk for later delinquency, aggression, and rearrests, and they designated school children more likely to be rated by parents and teacher as having conduct problems and rated by peers as being rejected and mean.

Conclusions: The results lead to ranges of ICU scores that have support for their validity and can help to guide clinical decisions about children and adolescents who may be elevated on CU traits.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental material for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/15374416.2021.1955371

Notes

¹ Factor analyses have often identified subdomains within this overarching factor. However, the validity of these subdomains have been questioned, since they seem to be, at least in part, a result of item wording (Ray et al., 2016). That is, a callousness factor often emerges consisting largely of items worded in the positive, callous direction, and an uncaring factor often emerges consisting largely of items worded in the negative, prosocial direction. However, in the few factor analyses that consider item wording as a method factor, the results support the structure that led to the development of ICU, with 4 item clusters consisting of 6 items each (3 positively worded and 3 negatively worded) contributing to an overarching CU factor (Kliem et al., 2020; Koutsogiorgi et al., 2020).

² We recognize that peer rejection is often measured as a difference score between nominations of being “liked least” by classmates subtracted from nominations of being “liked most” by classmates (McMullen et al., 2014). However, due to concerns about the psychometric properties of difference scores (De Los Reyes, 2017), only the “liked least” nomination was used to validate the ICU. When analyses were run using than more traditional method of assessing peer rejection, the results were relatively unchanged.

Additional information

Funding

The Crossroads Study is supported by grants from the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention [2010-JF-FX-0612], the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation [09-94942-000 HCD and 10-95802-000 HCD], the National Institute of Justice, the William T. Grant Foundation, the County of Orange, and the Fudge Family Foundation.