Response Patterns to Emotional Faces Among Adolescents Diagnosed With ADHD

Objective: The present study investigated differences in emotional face processing between adolescents (age 15-18) with ADHD-Combined type (ADHD-CT) and typically developing controls. Method: Participants completed a visual emotional task in which they were asked to rate the degree of negativity/positivity of four facial expressions (taken from the NimStim face stimulus set). Results: Participants’ ratings, ratings’ variability, response times (RTs), and RTs’ variability were analyzed. Results showed a significant interaction between group and the type of presented stimuli. Adolescents with ADHD-CT discriminated less between positive and negative emotional expressions compared with those without ADHD. In addition, adolescents with ADHD-CT exhibited greater variability in their RTs and in their ratings of facial expressions when compared with controls. Conclusion: The present results lend further support to the existence of a specific deficit or alteration in the processing of emotional face stimuli among ...