Emotion perception in adult attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder
Jeanne Bisch1, Benjamin Kreifelts1, Johannes Bretscher1
1Department of General Psychiatry, University of Tübingen, Calwer Straße 14, 72076, Tübingen, Germany.
Journal of Neural Transmission (Vienna, Austria : 1996)
|February 7, 2016
Summary
Adults with attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) show impaired emotion recognition from facial expressions and voice. However, they can compensate through audiovisual integration, suggesting sensory-specific processing deficits.
Area of Science:
- Neuroscience
- Psychology
- Cognitive Science
Background:
- Attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is associated with social cognition deficits.
- Emotion recognition is crucial for social interaction and can be impaired in ADHD.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate emotion recognition from facial expression and prosody in adults with ADHD compared to healthy controls.
- To explore the role of basic cognitive functions and audiovisual integration in emotion perception in ADHD.
Main Methods:
- Utilized a balanced stimulus set for facial and prosodic emotion recognition tasks.
- Compared 23 adult ADHD patients with 31 healthy controls (HC).
- Assessed basic cognitive functions and self-rated emotional intelligence.
Main Results:
- ADHD patients exhibited significantly poorer recognition of all tested emotions (neutral, happiness, anger, disgust, eroticism).
- Deficits in social cognition were independent of basic cognitive functions like attention and intelligence.
- ADHD patients showed enhanced emotion recognition through audiovisual integration, compensating for unimodal deficits.
Conclusions:
- Adult ADHD is linked to broad deficits in social cognition, specifically emotion perception.
- Audiovisual integration may partially compensate for unimodal emotion recognition impairments in ADHD.
- Findings suggest sensory-specific processing alterations rather than audiovisual integration deficits in adult ADHD.
