Social problems in young children: the interplay of ADHD symptoms and facial emotion recognition

ABSTRACT

Facial emotion recognition (FER) deficits interfere with interpretation of social situations and selection of appropriate responses. Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) symptoms are independently associated with social difficulties and might exacerbate the influence of deficient FER, because children with ADHD symptoms have fewer compensatory resources in social situations when they misinterpret emotions. Very few studies have tested this hypothesis in a community context, where child ADHD symptoms vary on a continuum. The current study extended this work by utilising a community sample (N = 87) of boys and girls in middle childhood (M = 7.83 years) and testing for moderation of FER effects separately by ADHD symptom type (ADHD-I = inattentive, H = hyperactive/impulsive, C = combined) using linear regression. While lower FER was associated with more social problems, this relationship was qualified by the presence of ADHD symptoms. Specifically, only children with relatively high ADHD symptoms in our community sample showed this inverse relationship, which was clearest among children with elevated ADHD-C or ADHD-I symptoms. No gender differences were observed. These results support our primary hypothesis, extend prior findings to boys and girls in the community, and have implications for understanding how ADHD symptoms and FER influence youth social deficits.

KEYWORDS:

• Emotion recognition
• ADHD
• social problems
• children
• gender

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Bonferroni correction produces a marginal interaction for ADHD-C at p = .05, which would not alter our interpretations. Notably, the Bonferroni procedure has been criticized as being too conservative, and there is not yet consensus on alternatives, with some statisticians arguing against such corrections (e.g., Rothman, 1990; Saville, 1990) in favor of reporting all comparisons, as we have done.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by The Institute for Society, Culture, and Environment; The Center for Peace Studies and Violence Prevention (CPSVP) at Virginia Tech.