Deficit In Selective Attention To Facial Emotion In Children With ADHD

Attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder(ADHD)is a common developmental mental disorder.In addition to attention and other cognitive defects,there are also defects in social ability.This may be related to the abnormal processing of emotional information in ADHD children.Existing studies have found that ADHD children do have abnormal selective attention to general information,but there is no relevant research report on whether there is abnormal selective attention to emotional information.This study will be the first to investigate ADHD children’s selective attention to emotional faces.In Study 1,emotional face matrix was used as experimental material to explore the abnormal performance of ADHD children’s selective attention to emotional face,include of four conditions of happy target in neutral distractors,anger target in neutral distractors,happy target in emotional distractors and anger target in emotional distractors.Thirty-three children diagnosed with ADHD were recruited in the hospital,and 31 healthy children were recruited through the school and community.The results show that ADHD children have abnormal performance in emotional face selective attention,which the accuracy of the four conditions decreased.No significant difference of response time was found between the two groups.For emotional face recognition,eye information plays a very important role,so the second study investigated whether the selective attention of ADHD children to emotional face is affected by eye information.In the second study,eye emotional images were used for visual search experiment.Thirty-one children diagnosed with ADHD were recruited in the hospital,and 33 healthy children were recruited through the school and community.The results showed that children with ADHD had a significant deficit on the selective attention in emotional eyes.The accuracy of the four kinds of conditional reactions was also lower than that of normal children.No significant difference of response time was found between the two groups.The above results indicate that ADHD children’s ability to find target stimuli in multiple emotional faces is weak,and they have selective attention disorder to emotional information.Their abnormal selective attention to emotional faces may be related to the abnormal processing of eye information.