title: [Cognitive and emotional empathy in children with ADHD and conduct disorder].
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  This study assesses the cognitive and emotional empathic competence in groups of children and adolescents with psychiatric disorders compared to a nonclinical control group. Subjective and objective diagnostic measures were employed.
  
  
  METHODS
  A total of 96 boys were tested: 20 with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) predominantly inattentive subtype (ADHD-I); 20 with ADHD combined subtype (ADHD-C); 20 with conduct disorder (CD); 36 healthy boys (control group; CG). Mean age was 12.0 years (SD = 2.36). As aspects of cognitive and emotional empathy emotional reactivity, we tested emotion recognition and perspective taking with subjective questionnaires and objective tasks, using as subjective questionnaires the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI; Davis, 1983) and the Index of Empathy for Children and Adolescents (IECA; Bryant, 1982). As objective tasks, we adopted the Empathy Response Task (ERT; Ricard & Kamberk-Kilicci, 1995) and a task measuring emotion recognition according to Buitelaar et al. (1999).
  
  
  RESULTS
  The CG outperformed participants with ADHD-C and CD in objective tasks assessing perspective taking, particularly when complex tasks were applied as stimuli. Children with ADHD-I showed significantly more emotional empathy than boys with ADHD-C when presented with simple tasks. No group differences were found for emotion recognition and subjective questionnaires.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Deficits in perspective taking and emotional empathy were found for children with ADHD-C and CD, largely in accordance with the literature. Similar to the processing of cognitive information, the processing of emotional information seems to differ in ADHD subtypes. Objective tasks and tasks with a high ecological validity seem suitable for the measurement of empathy.
authors.affiliation: Klinik für Psychiatrie, Psychosomatik und Psychotherapie des Kindes- und Jugendalters, Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Frankfurt a. Main. christina.schwenck@kgu.de
authors.forename: Christina
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Schwenck
authors.forename: Dominique
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Schmitt
authors.forename: Sabrina
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Sievers
authors.forename: Marcel
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Romanos
authors.forename: Andreas
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Warnke
authors.forename: Wolfgang
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Schneider
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000367:Age Factors; D001289:Attention Deficit Disorder with Hyperactivity / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000523:psychology*; D016022:Case-Control Studies; D002648:Child; D003072:Cognition Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000523:psychology*; D019955:Conduct Disorder / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000523:psychology*; D056348:Emotional Intelligence; D004644:Emotions; D004645:Empathy; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010555:Personality Inventory / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D011594:Psychometrics / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D012016:Reference Values; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires