How Do Children with ADHD Recognize Emotions in Faces?

What you need to know

• Children with ADHD symptoms show small impairments in recognizing facial emotions compared to typically developing children
• These impairments are more pronounced for subtle facial expressions
• Difficulty recognizing emotions is linked to more social and emotional problems in children with ADHD symptoms
• Improving emotion recognition skills may help reduce social and emotional difficulties for these children

Understanding emotions in faces

Being able to recognize emotions in other people’s faces is an important social skill that develops during childhood. This ability helps children interact appropriately with others and form friendships. However, some children struggle more with recognizing facial expressions, including many children with symptoms of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

ADHD is a common neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by problems with attention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity. Many children with ADHD also experience difficulties with social skills and emotional regulation. Researchers have suggested that trouble recognizing emotions in faces may contribute to these social and emotional challenges.

This study examined facial emotion recognition abilities in children with ADHD symptoms compared to typically developing children. The researchers were interested in how accurately children could identify different emotions, especially when the facial expressions were subtle.

How the study worked

The study included 83 children aged 6-12 who had symptoms of ADHD and 30 typically developing children in the same age range. The children with ADHD symptoms did not necessarily have a formal ADHD diagnosis, but showed elevated levels of inattention and/or hyperactivity according to teacher ratings.

All of the children completed a computerized facial emotion recognition task. They were shown pictures of children’s faces displaying different emotions - happiness, anger, fear, and sadness - at varying levels of intensity. The facial expressions ranged from very subtle (20% intensity) to very obvious (100% intensity).

After seeing each face briefly, the children had to identify which emotion was being expressed by selecting from a list of options. The researchers measured how accurately children could recognize each emotion at different intensity levels.

Key findings on emotion recognition

Overall, the children with ADHD symptoms performed slightly worse on the emotion recognition task compared to the typically developing children. The difference was small but consistent across emotions.

The gap in performance was most noticeable for subtle facial expressions. As the emotional expressions became more intense and obvious, the children with ADHD symptoms improved in accuracy, but not quite as much as the typically developing children.

Interestingly, the pattern of mistakes was similar between groups. When children in either group made errors, they were most likely to mistakenly label an emotional expression as neutral. This suggests the children with ADHD symptoms did not have a biased perception of emotions, but rather had more general difficulty detecting emotions, especially subtle ones.

The researchers also found that boys and girls performed similarly on the task. Additionally, symptoms of oppositional defiant disorder, which often co-occurs with ADHD, did not seem to impact emotion recognition abilities.

Link to social and emotional problems

Within the group of children with ADHD symptoms, those who struggled more with recognizing facial emotions also tended to have more social and emotional difficulties in everyday life, according to parent and teacher reports.

Specifically, lower accuracy on the emotion recognition task was associated with:

• More problems getting along with peers
• More emotional issues like anxiety and sadness

This suggests that difficulty recognizing emotions may be one factor contributing to the social and emotional challenges many children with ADHD experience.

Why emotion recognition matters

The ability to quickly and accurately identify emotions in others’ faces is crucial for smooth social interactions. When a child has trouble with this skill, it can lead to misunderstandings and social mistakes.

For example, a child who struggles to detect subtle signs of sadness or hurt in a peer’s expression may not realize when they’ve upset someone. Or a child who has difficulty recognizing anger cues may not pick up on when to back off in a tense social situation.

Over time, frequently misreading social signals can damage relationships and self-esteem. A child may develop anxiety about social situations or feel rejected by peers without understanding why.

The findings from this study highlight how even mild impairments in facial emotion recognition may have meaningful impacts on children’s social and emotional wellbeing. For children with ADHD symptoms who are already at higher risk for peer problems, this skill deficit could compound their social difficulties.

Implications for supporting children with ADHD

This research suggests several potential strategies for helping children with ADHD symptoms who struggle socially:

Assess emotion recognition skills: Evaluating a child’s ability to identify facial expressions could help pinpoint if this is an area of difficulty contributing to their social challenges.

Practice emotion recognition: Targeted training to improve emotion recognition skills may benefit some children with ADHD. This could involve activities like looking at pictures of faces and discussing the emotions shown.

Build emotion awareness: Help children tune into emotional cues by encouraging them to notice and label feelings in themselves and others. Books, movies, and real-life situations can be opportunities to discuss emotions.

Teach compensatory strategies: For children who have ongoing difficulty reading subtle expressions, teach explicit strategies for checking in about others’ feelings (e.g. asking “How are you feeling about that?”).

Address underlying attention: Since ADHD involves problems with attention, some children may miss emotional cues simply because they aren’t focusing on faces. Strategies to improve sustained attention could help.

Consider intensity: Remember that children with ADHD symptoms may struggle most with subtle expressions. In social skills training, start with very clear, exaggerated expressions before moving to more nuanced ones.

Conclusions

• Children with ADHD symptoms show small but consistent impairments in facial emotion recognition compared to typically developing peers
• These children have the most difficulty recognizing subtle emotional expressions
• Trouble recognizing emotions is linked to more social and emotional problems in daily life for children with ADHD symptoms
• Assessing and improving emotion recognition skills may be helpful as part of social skills interventions for children with ADHD

While this study focused on children with elevated ADHD symptoms, the findings may also apply to children with diagnosed ADHD. More research is still needed to clarify the exact relationship between ADHD, emotion recognition abilities, and social functioning.

However, this work highlights the importance of considering emotion recognition skills when trying to understand and address the social challenges many children with ADHD face. Ultimately, helping these children better recognize emotions could improve their social interactions and emotional wellbeing.