title: Emotion perception in adult attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder.
abstract: This study examined identification of emotional information in facial expression, prosody, and their combination in 23 adult patients with combined attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) versus 31 healthy controls (HC) matched for gender, age, and education. We employed a stimulus set which was carefully balanced for valence as well as recognizability of the expressed emotions as determined in an independent sample of HC to avoid potential biases due to different levels of task difficulty. ADHD patients were characterized by impaired recognition of all employed categories (neutral, happiness, eroticism, disgust, anger). Basic cognitive functions as assessed by neuropsychological testing, such as sustained attention, constancy of alertness, and verbal intelligence partially explained lower recognition rates. Removal of the correlated variance by means of regression analyses did not abolish lower performance in ADHD indicating deficits in social cognition independent of these neuropsychological factors (p < 0.05). Lower performance correlated with self-rated emotional intelligence (r = 0.38, p < 0.05) indicating that adults with ADHD are aware of their problems in emotion perception. ADHD patients could partly compensate their deficit in unimodal emotion perception by audiovisual integration as revealed by larger gains in emotion recognition accuracy during bimodal presentation (p < 0.05) as compared to HC. These behavioral results can serve as foundation for future neuroimaging studies and point rather towards sensory-specific regions than audiovisual integration areas in perception of emotional information in adult ADHD.
authors: Department of General Psychiatry, University of Tübingen, Calwer Straße 14, 72076, Tübingen, Germany.
authors: Jeanne
authors: J
authors: Bisch
authors: Department of General Psychiatry, University of Tübingen, Calwer Straße 14, 72076, Tübingen, Germany.
authors: Benjamin
authors: B
authors: Kreifelts
authors: Department of General Psychiatry, University of Tübingen, Calwer Straße 14, 72076, Tübingen, Germany.
authors: Johannes
authors: J
authors: Bretscher
authors: Department of General Psychiatry, University of Tübingen, Calwer Straße 14, 72076, Tübingen, Germany.
authors: Dirk
authors: D
authors: Wildgruber
authors: Department of General Psychiatry, University of Tübingen, Calwer Straße 14, 72076, Tübingen, Germany.
authors: Andreas
authors: A
authors: Fallgatter
authors: Department of General Psychiatry, University of Tübingen, Calwer Straße 14, 72076, Tübingen, Germany. Thomas.Ethofer@med.uni-tuebingen.de.|Department of Biomedical Magnetic Resonance, University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany. Thomas.Ethofer@med.uni-tuebingen.de.
authors: Thomas
authors: T
authors: Ethofer
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001289:Attention Deficit Disorder with Hyperactivity / Q000503:physiopathology* / Q000523:psychology*; D016022:Case-Control Studies; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology*; D005149:Facial Expression; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011594:Psychometrics; D057566:Self Report; D012919:Social Behavior; D014705:Verbal Behavior / Q000502:physiology; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: ADHD; Attention; Audiovisual integration; Emotional intelligence; Facial expression; Prosody