Dataset Information

Are emotion recognition abilities intact in pediatric ADHD?

ABSTRACT: Extant studies suggest that children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) may make more errors and respond more slowly on tasks that require them to identify emotions based on facial affect. It is unclear, however, whether these findings reflect a unique deficit in emotion recognition, or more general difficulty with choice-response tasks (i.e., tasks that require participants to select among a set of competing options). In addition, ADHD is associated with executive dysfunction, but there is inconsistent evidence regarding the extent to which top-down cognitive control is involved in emotion recognition. The current study used a series of four counterbalanced tasks to systematically manipulate emotional content and working memory demands to determine (a) whether children with ADHD exhibit a unique facial affect recognition deficit and (b) the extent to which facial affect recognition is an automatic versus controlled process that depends in part on working memory. Bayesian results from a carefully phenotyped sample of 64 children ages 8 to 13 (M = 10.42, SD = 1.56; 26 girls; 67% Caucasian/non-Hispanic) with ADHD (n = 35) and without ADHD (n = 29) indicated that working memory is involved in children's ability to efficiently infer emotional state from facial affect (BF??= 4.59 × 10¹?). Importantly, there was significant evidence against deficits in emotion recognition for children with ADHD. The ADHD/non-ADHD groups were statistically equivalent in terms of recognition accuracy (BF?? = 1.32 × 10??, d = -0.18), and the ADHD group's slower recognition speed was parsimoniously explained by difficulty with choice-response tasks rather than unique to emotional stimuli (BF?? = 3.23, d = 0.31). These findings suggest that emotion recognition abilities are intact in children with ADHD, and highlight the need to control for impaired bottom-up (choice-response) and top-down abilities (working memory) when investigating emotional functioning in ADHD. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

SUBMITTER: Wells EL

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6535378 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Are emotion recognition abilities intact in pediatric ADHD?

Wells Erica L EL Day Taylor N TN Harmon Sherelle L SL Groves Nicole B NB Kofler Michael J MJ

Emotion (Washington, D.C.) 20181126 7

Extant studies suggest that children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) may make more errors and respond more slowly on tasks that require them to identify emotions based on facial affect. It is unclear, however, whether these findings reflect a unique deficit in emotion recognition, or more general difficulty with choice-response tasks (i.e., tasks that require participants to select among a set of competing options). In addition, ADHD is associated with executive dysfunction, ...[more]

PMID: 30475028

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Project description:Inconsistent evidence suggests that pediatric attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) may be associated with impairments in the ability to use context clues to infer the emotion states of others. However, the evidence base for these impairments is comprised of data from laboratory-based tests of emotion inference that may be confounded by demands on nonaffective cognitive processes that have been linked with ADHD. The current study builds on our previous study of facial affect recognition to address this limitation and investigate a potential mechanism underlying children's ability to infer emotion state from context clues. To do so, we used a fully crossed, counterbalanced experimental design that systematically manipulated emotion inference and working memory demands in 77 carefully phenotyped children ages 8-13 (Mage = 10.46, SD = 1.54; 66% Caucasian/Non-Hispanic; 42% female) with ADHD (n = 42) and without ADHD (n = 35). Results of Bayesian mixed-model ANOVAs indicated that using context clues to infer the emotion state of others competed for neurocognitive resources with the processes involved in rehearsing/maintaining information within working memory (BF₁₀ = 1.57 × 10¹⁹, d = 0.72). Importantly, there was significant evidence against the critical Group × Condition interaction for response times (BF₀₁ = 4.93), and no significant evidence for this interaction for accuracy (BF₀₁ = 2.40). In other words, children with ADHD do not infer emotions more slowly than children without ADHD (d = 0.13), and their small magnitude impairment in accuracy (d = 0.30) was attributable to their generally less accurate performance on choice-response tasks (i.e., across both emotion and control conditions). Taken together, the evidence indicates that emotion inference abilities are likely unimpaired in pediatric ADHD and that working memory is implicated in the ability to infer emotion from context for all children-not just children with ADHD. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Dataset Information

Are emotion recognition abilities intact in pediatric ADHD?

Publications

Are emotion recognition abilities intact in pediatric ADHD?

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