Poster #45 - Emotional Prosody Perception Abilities and the Relation to Executive Functions in school-aged Children with ADHD

• In Event: 1-115 - Poster Session 03
  In Poster Session: PS 03 Section - Developmental Disabilities

Integrative Statement

Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is associated with a range of social cognition impairments. During social interactions, the ability to correctly recognize speakers’ emotions from their utterances is essential to understanding the communicative intentions of the speaker. Thus, atypical emotional prosody perception may explain social communication deficits in children with ADHD. However, relatively little research has addressed the issue and the exact manifestation and nature of emotional prosody perception difficulty in ADHD are still uncertain. Therefore, the purpose of this study was first to investigate whether school-aged children with ADHD were less accurate than typical-developing (TD) children in using emotional prosody information to judge emotions. In addition, the association between emotional prosody perception and various domains of executive functions were assessed.
Participants consisted of 12 children with ADHD (mean age = 10 years, 3 mo.) and 17 TD children (mean age = 10 years, 2 mo.) between 9 and 12 years of age. All children were recruited from elementary schools using public advertisements in the Taipei metropolitan area in Taiwan. Children with ADHD were diagnosed according to DSM-5 criteria (APA, 2013) by child psychiatrists. The stimuli for the emotional prosody identification task were delivered using a Mandarin monosyllabic word /chi/ with variation in emotional prosody (i.e., happy, sad, angry, and neutral). Children were asked to respond by pointing to response emotional labels on the screen. Executive functions of inhibition, working memory, shifting and planning were respectively tested by computerized go-nogo task, spatial working memory task (SWM), Wisconsin Card sorting task (WCST), and Tower of London task (TOL).
Results showed that children with ADHD performed poorer than TD children in identifying emotional prosodies (Figure 1.). A two-way ANOVA with Group (ADHD, Control) as a between-subject factor and Emotional Type (happy, angry, sad, neutral) as a within-subject factor were conducted. Significant effect of Group (F(1,27)=28.72, p <.001), Emotional Type (F(3,81)=21.16, p<.001), and Group x Emotional Type (F(3, 81)=3.41, p=.036) were found. Post-hoc tests revealed that children with ADHD performed poorer in each emotion type, and the differences between the two groups were more obvious in the sad and neural conditions.
Combining data from TD children and children with ADHD, correlation analyses revealed a positive association between the accuracy in the emotional prosody identification task and the accuracy in go-nogo task (r=.78, p<.001), the total error in SWM task (r=-.73, p<.001), and total shift times in the WCST task (r=.71, p<.001). No correlation was found between emotional prosody and index in the TOL task. To test the contributions of different domain of executive functions to emotional prosody perception, measures were entered in the regression model. The multiple regression model with the accuracy in go-nogo task and the errors in the SWM task accounted for the variance of the emotional prosody identification accuracy (R2=.692, p<.001).
In sum, the findings indicate that school-aged children with ADHD experience difficulties in recognizing emotional prosody, and this difficulty in emotional prosody perception may be attributed to their executive function limitations, specifically in the domain of inhibition control and the working memory.

Authors

• Yuchun Chen, Fu Jen Catholic University
  Presenting Author

• Yi-Rou Huang, Fu Jen Catholic University
  Non-Presenting Author