Facial emotion recognition deficit in two groups of children with ADHD- with and without conduct disorder- compared with normal children

Children with attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and conduct disorder (CD) have impaired interpersonal and social skills, highly due to deficiency in facial emotion processing. The aim of this study was to investigate facial emotion recognition between two groups of children with ADHD - with and without conduct disorder - compared with normal children.
Fifty-five male children with between the ages of 8 to 13 in Tabriz and Esfahan were selected by purposeful sampling method and assigned in the following three groups: 23 ADHD, 14 ADHD and 18 children in normal control group. All participants performed facial emotion recognition task including unfamiliar faces which contain four basic emotions «anger, happiness, sadness, fear and neutral faces» for assessing ability to recognize facial emotion. The data was analyzed by MANOVA.
Percent error analysis revealed that participants with ADHD and ADHD have greater deficit in emotional face recognition when compared with control subjects. However, analysis of error response type showed that ADHD children, often confused distress cues (sadness, fear) with neutral face on the one hand, and neutral face with anger on the other hand.
These findings would suggest that facial emotion recognition deficits in children with ADHD and ADHD occur mostly due to ADHD symptoms such as attention deficit, emotion regulation and executive function deficit. Nevertheless, children with ADHD who have conduct symptoms perform in an exaggerated or reductionist manner in the processing of some facial expressions, which lead to perceptual distortion.