Recognition of facial expressions of emotion by children with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder.
Kids with ADHD often misread fear in faces, so teach emotion spotting in social skills blocks.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Clarke et al. (1998) showed photos of happy, sad, angry, scared, and surprised faces to kids with ADHD.
The kids said what emotion each face showed. The team compared their answers to typical peers.
What they found
Children with ADHD got about three out of every four faces right.
They most often mixed up fear, calling it something else.
How this fits with other research
Cardillo et al. (2023) later saw the same struggle in older kids with ADHD when short clips mixed sound and video.
Ka-Cheng et al. (2024) proved the skill can be taught: preschoolers with ADHD who watched a short cartoon app caught up to peers.
Van Cauwenberge et al. (2015) seems to disagree. They found no extra emotional interference in ADHD and blamed plain executive function. The tasks differ: one asked “What is this face?” while the other timed reactions to emotional pictures. Different questions, different results.
Why it matters
If a client with ADHD interrupts or seems rude, check if they read faces wrong. Add quick emotion-ID drills to social groups. Use flash cards, apps, or pause-and-label games while watching shows. Teaching kids to spot fear can cut peer conflict and boost friendships.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Fifty children and adolescents were tested for their ability to recognize the 6 basic facial expressions of emotion depicted in Ekman and Friesen's normed photographs. Subjects were presented with sets of 6 photographs of faces, each portraying a different basic emotion, and stories portraying those emotions were read to them. After each story, the subject was asked to point to the photograph in the set that depicted the emotion described. Overall, the children correctly identified the emotions on 74% of the presentations. The highest level of accuracy in recognition was for happiness, followed by sadness, with fear being the emotional expression that was mistaken most often. When compared to studies of children in the general population, children with ADHD have deficits in their ability to accurately recognize facial expressions of emotion. These findings have important implications for the remediation of social skill deficits commonly seen in children with ADHD.
Behavior modification, 1998 · doi:10.1177/01454455980222002