Disinhibited Reactive Attachment Disorder symptoms impair social judgements from faces Running head: Trustworthiness and Reactive Attachment Disorder

In typically developing populations, adults and children can come to a consensus regarding the trustworthiness of unfamiliar faces very rapidly. Maltreated children can have problems with trusting others, yet those with the disinhibited form of Reactive Attachment Disorder (dRAD) can be indiscriminately friendly. However, whether children with dRAD symptoms appraise and conform to typical judgements about trustworthiness of faces is still unknown. To address these questions, we recorded the eye movements of 10 maltreated dRAD children and 10 typically developing control children matched for age and gender while they made social judgements from faces. The children were presented with a series of pairs of faces that had been previously been judged by adults to have high or low attractiveness or trustworthiness ratings. As predicted, typically developing children, like adults in previous studies, reached a consensus regarding which faces were the most trustworthy and attractive. Interestingly, there was less agreement among the children with dRAD symptoms. Moreover, the judgments from the typically developing children showed, as for adults, a strong correlation between the attractiveness and trustworthiness tasks. This was not the case for the dRAD group, which showed less agreement and no significant correlation between trustworthiness and attractiveness judgments. Finally, both groups of children tended to generally appraise similar areas of the face in making their judgments. Both groups sampled preferentially the eye region to perform social judgments. Our data offer a unique insight in children with dRAD symptoms, providing novel and important knowledge for their rehabilitation.