title: Processing of affective prosody in boys suffering from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder: A near-infrared spectroscopy study.
abstract: Neurobiological studies on facial affect recognition have demonstrated reduced response amplitudes to anger cues in patients suffering from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). It is still unclear whether a similar deficit exists in the auditory domain. Therefore, this near-infrared spectroscopy study focused on neuronal correlates of affective prosody processing. Fourteen boys suffering from ADHD and fourteen healthy boys were exposed to emotionally intoned, standardized sentences of the categories anger, sadness, happiness, and to affectively neutral sentences. Relative to controls, the patients displayed a diminished activation of the right superior temporal gyrus (STG) when processing anger prosody, which was correlated with aggressive behavior. There were no group differences for the other emotions. Additionally, the ADHD group showed increased supramarginal gyrus (SMG) activation in the anger condition. This might mirror compensatory attention allocation. In summary, we identified a selectively lowered STG activation to auditory anger cues in ADHD patients. Consequently, STG recruitment during anger exposure might be used for evaluation of psychotherapy effects.
authors.affiliation: a Department of Clinical Psychology , University of Graz , Graz , Austria.
authors.forename: Angelika
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Köchel
authors.affiliation: a Department of Clinical Psychology , University of Graz , Graz , Austria.
authors.forename: Florian
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Schöngaßner
authors.affiliation: a Department of Clinical Psychology , University of Graz , Graz , Austria.
authors.forename: Silke
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Feierl-Gsodam
authors.affiliation: a Department of Clinical Psychology , University of Graz , Graz , Austria.
authors.forename: Anne
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Schienle
mesh_terms: D000339:Affect / Q000502:physiology*; D001289:Attention Deficit Disorder with Hyperactivity / Q000503:physiopathology*; D001921:Brain / Q000503:physiopathology*; D001931:Brain Mapping; D002648:Child; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology; D011932:Reading; D019265:Spectroscopy, Near-Infrared
keywords: ADHD; Anger; Emotional prosody; NIRS; Superior temporal gyrus