Emotional Information Processing in Attention Deficit Disorder With or Without Hyperactivity

The main symptoms of Attentional Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) are inattention, motor agitation and impulsivity. However, other dysfunctions affecting the quality of life remain poorly studied: lack of understanding and management of emotions, focus on the local aspects of a visual scene limiting the ability to assign a general meaning to the scene and alteration of long-term memory encoding. This study aims to analyse these difficulties using different tasks requiring processing of rich and varied everyday images, having high ecological validity. It involves the participation of 56 boys and girls with ADHD, aged 7 to 12 years. A first phase examines the immediate understanding of images using two tasks: semantic categorization (Experiment 1) and emotional evaluation (Experiment 2) of images with positive, negative or neutral emotional valence, and depicting real environments (natural vs. manufactured contexts) or foreground objects pasted into a noise background (inanimate objects vs. animals vs. people. In each trial, one context image and one object image are presented briefly and simultaneously, one in each visual field. In order to be appropriately understood in both their semantic and emotional contents, context images will require more global processing, while object images will require more local, detailed processing. Their semantic (Exp. 1) and emotional (Exp. 2) consistency is manipulated. A week later, the participants have to perform a memory task requiring old/new recognition in a two-alternative forced choice (2AFC) paradigm that presents in each trial a pair of images (one old, one new) having the same emotional valence (Exp. 3). The study will characterize the specificities of processing and representing visual emotional information in ADHD children. The results will be compared with those from a previous study we conducted with the same methodology on neuro-typical children (controls).