Behavioral Sciences and the Law Behav. Sci. Law 24: 21–37 (2006) Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10.1002/bsl.668 Psychopathy, Aggression, and the Processing of Emotional Stimuli in Non-Referred Girls and Boys Eva R. Kimonis, Ph.D., 1 Paul J. Frick, Ph.D., 2 * Holly Fazekas, B.S. 2 and Bryan R. Loney 3 Research shows that individuals with psychopathic traits differ in how they process negative emotional stimuli. However, it is unclear whether these differences are spe- cific to certain types of negative emotional stimulus and whether they are more strongly associated with psycho- pathic traits or aggression. Further, it is not clear whether or not deficits in emotional processing generalize to fe- males and ethnic minority individuals with psychopathic traits. In this study, we examined the emotional processing of visual stimuli using a dot-probe task in 50 non-referred girls and boys (mean age of 9.30; SD ¼ 2.00). Overall, there was a significant association between proactive aggression and reduced responsiveness to distressing stimuli. In ad- dition, the predicted association between psychopathic traits and reduced responsiveness to distressing stimuli was only found for children high on aggression. Also, the associations among aggression, psychopathic traits, and responsiveness to distressing stimuli did not differ for boys and girls. Copyright # 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. The construct of psychopathy focuses on a constellation of affective (e.g. lack of guilt and empathy), interpersonal (e.g. using others for one’s own gain), self- referential (e.g. considers oneself more important than others) and behavioral (e.g. lack of planning and forethought) traits that are present in a subgroup of antisocial individuals (Hare, Hart, & Harpur, 1991). There has been recent interest in studying potential childhood precursors to psychopathy in an effort to better understand the developmental processes that may lead to this serious form of personality disturbance. Although this research is clearly at an early stage and much more work is needed before firm conclusions about developmental precursors can be made, the results of this research are promising in a number of respects. First, in incarcerated (Kruh, Frick, & Clements, 2005), clinic-referred (Christian, Frick, Copyright # 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. *Correspondence to: Paul J. Frick, Department of Psychology, University of New Orleans, 2001 Geology and Psychology Building, New Orleans, LA 70148, U.S.A. E-mail: pfrick@uno.edu 1 University of California, Irvine, U.S.A. 2 University of New Orleans, U.S.A. 3 University of California, Irvine, USA.