Core Lexicon

Heterogeneity

Plain meaning: people who look similar behaviorally may differ in the processes producing the behavior. Technical meaning: meaningful between-person variation within an apparently common phenotype or diagnostic grouping. Why it matters: this is a major reason Fanti repeatedly uses subtyping and person-oriented methods.

Phenotype

Plain meaning: the observable pattern of traits, symptoms, or behavior. Why it matters: the atlas distinguishes phenotype from mechanism and cause.

CU — Callous-Unemotional traits

Plain meaning: reduced guilt, empathy, emotional depth, or concern about others/performance. Technical role: dimensional trait construct often used to identify clinically meaningful heterogeneity among youth with conduct problems. Why it matters: CU traits move through several roles in Fanti's work: subgroup marker, predictor, correlate, and part of developmental mechanism models.

CP — Conduct Problems

Plain meaning: persistent patterns of serious rule-breaking, aggression, deceit, or related externalizing behavior. Why it matters: a frequent distal behavioral phenotype in the developmental studies.

CD — Conduct Disorder

A formal psychiatric diagnosis involving a persistent pattern of severe conduct problems.

DLPFC — Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex

Frontal cortical region involved in cognitive control, attention, working memory, and aspects of emotion processing. It is targeted in Fanti-group cTBS experiments.

TMS — Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation

Non-invasive magnetic stimulation used to alter cortical activity.

cTBS — Continuous Theta-Burst Stimulation

A patterned TMS protocol used to transiently alter cortical excitability. In this atlas it is treated as a causal manipulation tool, not automatically as a demonstrated clinical treatment.

AMT — Attention Modification Training

Computerized training intended to alter attentional bias.

HRV — Heart Rate Variability

Variation in time between heartbeats; often used as an index related to autonomic regulation.

fNIRS — Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy

Non-invasive method estimating cortical blood-oxygenation changes using near-infrared light.

Psychophysiology

Study of relationships between psychological processes and bodily measures such as heart rate, skin conductance, and startle.

Surrogate / proximal outcome

An intermediate measure such as gaze, emotion-recognition accuracy, or skin conductance. Improvement does not by itself establish improvement in distal clinical behavior.

Inference gate

A point where a stronger kind of claim requires a stronger research design—for example, moving from association to causal mechanism or from mechanism change to clinical efficacy.

HAB — Hostile Attribution Bias

Plain meaning: a tendency to interpret an ambiguous action by another person as deliberately hostile. Technical meaning: a social-information-processing bias in the attribution of intent, typically measured with ambiguous interpersonal scenarios. Why it matters: Fanti-linked 2026 intervention work attempts to modify HAB as a possible cognitive process related to aggression and anger-related cognition. HAB is distinct from attention bias.

ABM — Attention Bias Modification

Plain meaning: computerized training intended to change what kinds of stimuli preferentially capture or hold attention. Why it matters: ABM is a separate cognitive-modification lineage from HAB modification. The 2026 keynote language can obscure this distinction.

Angry rumination

Plain meaning: repeatedly thinking about anger-provoking experiences, their causes, or possible retaliation after the event. Why it matters: it is a cognitive process, not the same construct as anger intensity or aggressive behavior. A 2026 pilot specifically targets HAB and measures subsequent angry-rumination change.

Narcissism

A personality construct involving dimensions such as grandiosity, entitlement, self-focus, or vulnerability depending on the measure/model used. Why it matters: narcissism may overlap statistically with other dark traits but is not synonymous with psychopathy or psychopathic traits. The atlas never substitutes one for the other.

Pre–post intervention study

A design measuring participants before and after an intervention. Without a control/comparator, observed change cannot securely be attributed to the intervention because maturation, regression to the mean, expectancy, repeated testing, and external events remain alternative explanations.

Multimodal intervention / assessment

A programme combining more than one modality, measure, or intervention component. The term alone does not identify which components are active or causally responsible for any effect.

LF/HF — Low-Frequency / High-Frequency HRV Ratio

A frequency-domain ratio derived from heart-rate variability. It has historically been interpreted as an index of "sympathovagal balance," but that interpretation is controversial. Modern methodological guidance cautions that LF is not a pure sympathetic measure and LF/HF should not be treated as a direct readout of sympathetic-versus-parasympathetic balance. In this atlas, LF/HF is recorded first as a measured physiological ratio; any emotion-regulation interpretation is coded separately.

Resonance-Frequency Breathing

Slow paced breathing, individualized to the person, intended to maximize oscillation in heart rate and baroreflex activity during HRV biofeedback. Petridou's protocol tested breathing rates around 4.5–6.5 breaths per minute to identify an individualized resonance frequency.

Zukor's Drive

An interactive biofeedback video game incorporated into the later sessions of Petridou's HRV-biofeedback protocol. Physiological performance controls or influences the game, intended to increase engagement while practicing regulatory breathing/HRV skills.

Waiting-List Control

A comparison group that does not receive the intervention during the study period but may receive it later. A waiting list controls for time and repeated measurement but does not control well for expectancy, therapist/researcher contact, engagement, or placebo-like effects. It is therefore weaker than a well-matched active or sham control for identifying intervention-specific mechanisms.

PCIT — Parent–Child Interaction Therapy

A behavioral parent–child treatment in which clinicians coach caregivers during live interaction with their child. In the CU-adapted version, additional emphasis is placed on warmth, reinforcement, and emotional/prosocial processes.

CDI-CU — Child-Directed Interaction, CU adaptation

The CU-adapted Child-Directed Interaction phase used within PCIT-CU. It emphasizes warm, affectionate, responsive parent behavior during highly reinforcing child-led play, with real-time clinician coaching. In Fanti et al. (2024), this was the intervention condition with the clearest program-specific skin-conductance effect.

CARES — Coaching and Rewarding Emotional Skills

A targeted emotional-skills module for children with elevated CU/LPE traits. It trains attention to emotional facial/contextual cues, emotion labeling and understanding, emotional communication, prosocial responding, and regulation-related skills.

EE — Emotional Engagement

A parent–child intervention lineage developed to increase emotional engagement, including warm interaction and healthy reciprocal eye gaze. In Fanti et al. (2024), EE did not show the same intervention-specific sadness-processing effects as PCIT-CDI-CU.

CPTI — Child Problematic Traits Inventory

A questionnaire measuring child psychopathic-trait dimensions, including CU traits. Fanti et al. (2024) used elevated CU ratings from both parents and teachers to select the intervention sample.

CSI-4 — Child Symptom Inventory-4

A parent-report symptom inventory used in the 2018 school-prevention study to assess conduct-disorder symptoms. Symptom-score change should not automatically be equated with formal diagnostic remission.

Cluster-randomized trial

A trial in which intact groups—such as schools, clinics, or classrooms—rather than individual participants are assigned to conditions. The number of independent clusters matters: hundreds of children inside only a few schools do not provide hundreds of independent randomized treatment units.