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Emotion perception in adult attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder

  • Psychiatry and Preclinical Psychiatric Studies - Original Article
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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.

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Acknowledgments

This study was supported by the University of Tübingen (Fortüne 2000-0-0) and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG ET 112/5-1).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of General Psychiatry, University of Tübingen, Calwer Straße 14, 72076, Tübingen, Germany

    Jeanne Bisch, Benjamin Kreifelts, Johannes Bretscher, Dirk Wildgruber, Andreas Fallgatter & Thomas Ethofer

  2. Department of Biomedical Magnetic Resonance, University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany

    Thomas Ethofer

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  1. Jeanne Bisch
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  2. Benjamin Kreifelts
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  3. Johannes Bretscher
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  4. Dirk Wildgruber
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  5. Andreas Fallgatter
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  6. Thomas Ethofer
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Correspondence to Thomas Ethofer.

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Bisch, J., Kreifelts, B., Bretscher, J. et al. Emotion perception in adult attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. J Neural Transm 123, 961–970 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00702-016-1513-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00702-016-1513-x

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