Conduct disorder (CD), a disturbance characterised by excess rates of aggression – often associated with callousness, lack of empathy and shallow/deficient affect – is extremely prevalent (2–10%) in the juvenile population. CD symptoms are quantitative rather than qualitative in nature whereby, rather than exhibiting abnormal behaviours, CD patients indulge in normal behaviours at abnormal rates. Although genetic and environmental factors contribute to CD aetiology, their precise contribution is yet to be determined. Experimental animal models may aid discriminating genetic vs. environmental effects and designing innovative therapeutic approaches. Here we discuss a theoretical framework potentially favouring the design of experimental models of CD. We suggest that the latter shall recapitulate the “norm violation” typical of the human disorder across the core domains involved in CD: aggression, callousness, empathy and emotionality. We first review how these domains have been operationalised in preclinical models; we then suggest that these experimental paradigms shall be combined with appropriate statistical tools to identify a subset of individuals consistently characterised by abnormal values in CD-relevant phenotypes.

行为障碍（CD）是一种侵略性疾病，通常以无礼，同情，缺乏同情和浅/不足的影响为特征，在青少年人群中极为普遍（2-10％）。CD症状本质上是定量的而不是定性的，因此CD患者没有表现出异常的行为，而是以异常的速率沉迷于正常的行为。尽管遗传和环境因素有助于CD病因，但其确切的作用尚待确定。实验动物模型可能有助于区分遗传效应与环境效应，并设计创新的治疗方法。在这里，我们讨论了可能有利于CD实验模型设计的理论框架。我们建议，后者应概括涉及CD的核心领域中的人类失调典型的“规范违反”：侵略，无情，同情和情感。我们首先回顾一下这些领域如何在临床前模型中进行操作；然后，我们建议将这些实验范式与适当的统计工具结合起来，以识别以CD相关表型异常值为特征的个体子集。