Facial emotion recognition impairment predicts social and emotional problems in children with (subthreshold) ADHD

Abstract

Children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) symptoms often experience social and emotional problems. Impaired facial emotion recognition has been suggested as a possible underlying mechanism, although impairments may depend on the type and intensity of emotions. We investigated facial emotion recognition in children with (subthreshold) ADHD and controls using a novel task with children’s faces of emotional expressions varying in type and intensity. We further investigated associations between emotion recognition accuracy and social and emotional problems in the ADHD group. 83 children displaying ADHD symptoms and 30 controls (6–12 years) completed the Morphed Facial Emotion Recognition Task (MFERT). The MFERT assesses emotion recognition accuracy on four emotions using five expression intensity levels. Teachers and parents rated social and emotional problems on the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire. Repeated measures analysis of variance revealed that the ADHD group showed poorer emotion recognition accuracy compared to controls across emotions (small effect). The significant group by expression intensity interaction (small effect) showed that the increase in accuracy with increasing expression intensity was smaller in the ADHD group compared to controls. Multiple regression analyses within the ADHD group showed that emotion recognition accuracy was inversely related to social and emotional problems, but not prosocial behavior. Not only children with an ADHD diagnosis, but also children with subthreshold ADHD experience impairments in facial emotion recognition. This impairment is predictive for social and emotional problems, which may suggest that emotion recognition may contribute to the development of social and emotional problems in these children.

Treatment with Methylphenidate Improves Affective but Not Cognitive Empathy in Youths with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder

“…Children with ADHD showed impaired AE, compared to normal controls [ 17 , 18 , 19 ], either assessed as a trait using parent reports [ 20 ] or state assessed with affective responses to vignettes [ 17 ]. Furthermore, the difficulties in emotion recognition, involved in AE [ 16 ], have been reported in youths with ADHD [ 21 ]. Maoz et al (2019) [ 22 ] showed a global deficit in both the components of empathy in its self-report form.…”

Biological Bases of Empathy and Social Cognition in Patients with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder: A Focus on Treatment with Psychostimulants

“…Children and adolescents with ADHD also exhibit an impaired emotion recognition ability and a nonverbal receptive language deficit [ 5 , 48 , 49 ], which denotes a difficulty in detecting and interpreting social clues and generates impaired social interactions and interpersonal problems. In particular, individuals with ADHD are significantly poorer in identifying emotional expressions, especially the negative effects of fear, anger and sadness, likely originating from a primary deficiency in encoding social cues and selectively inhibiting irrelevant information in ADHD [ 43 , 50 ].…”

Social-Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties in Children with Neurodevelopmental Disorders: Emotion Perception in Daily Life and in a Formal Assessment Context

“…More recently, several studies have found similar difficulties in children with ADHD (e.g. Chronaki et al, 2015;Jusyte et al, 2017;Sjöwall et al, 2013;Staff et al, 2022) and DLD (e.g. Griffiths, et al, 2020;Spackman et al, 2005).…”