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Recognition of Basic Emotions Through Facial Expressions in Children with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder

Adriana Noelia Lewtak1, Rocio González2,3,4,5, Jesica Brenda Custodio2

  • 1Servicio de Neurología Infantil, Hospital Italiano de Buenos Aires, C1181ACH Ciudad de Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Revista De Neurologia
|July 4, 2025
PubMed

Insights

Children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) recognize basic and complex emotions similarly to neurotypical peers. However, they perform better recognizing emotions on children's faces than adults'.

Area of Science:

  • Neuroscience
  • Developmental Psychology
  • Child Psychiatry

Background:

  • Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder impacting attention and executive functions.
  • These cognitive differences may affect facial emotion recognition abilities.
  • Understanding emotion recognition in ADHD is crucial for social and emotional development.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the recognition of basic and complex emotions in pediatric subjects diagnosed with ADHD.
  • To compare emotion recognition performance between children with ADHD and neurotypical controls.
  • To examine the influence of face age (child vs. adult) on emotion recognition in this population.

Main Methods:

  • A prospective, cross-sectional, controlled study design was employed.
  • Sixty participants were recruited: 30 with ADHD and 30 neurotypical controls.
  • Participants identified emotions from photographs and video clips of child and adult faces.

Main Results:

  • No significant differences were observed in recognizing basic or complex emotions between the ADHD and control groups.
  • Participants demonstrated significantly better performance recognizing emotions on child faces compared to adult faces.
  • Emotion recognition accuracy for adult faces showed improvement with increasing age.

Conclusions:

  • Children with ADHD do not exhibit impaired facial emotion recognition compared to neurotypical children.
  • Emotion recognition performance is superior for child faces, suggesting avoidance of adult faces in assessments for this group.
  • Age positively correlates with the ability to recognize emotions on adult faces.
Abstract

Keywords:
ADHDbasic and complex emotionschildrenemotion recognitionfacial expressions

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