Several studies suggest that children with ADHD tend to perform worse than typically developing children on emotion recognition tasks. However, most of these studies have focused on the recognition of facial expression, while there is evidence that context plays a major role on emotion perception. This study aims at further investigating emotion processing in children with ADHD, by assessing not only facial emotion recognition (Experiment 1) but also emotion recognition on the basis of contextual cues (Experiment 2). Twenty-seven children and adolescents with ADHD were compared to age-matched typically developing controls. Importantly, findings of this study show that emotion-processing difficulties in children with ADHD extend beyond facial emotion and also affect the recognition of emotions on the basis of contextual information. Our data thus indicate that children with ADHD have an overall emotion-processing deficit.

There is a lack of knowledge about pain reactions in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), who have often been considered as insensitive to pain. The objective of this study was to describe the facial, behavioral and physiological reactions of children with ASD during venipuncture and to compare them to the reactions of children with an intellectual disability and nonimpaired control children. We also examined the relation between developmental age and pain reactions. The sample included 35 children with ASD, 32 children with an intellectual disability, and 36 nonimpaired children. The children were videotaped during venipuncture and their heart rate was recorded. Facial reactions were assessed using the Child Facial Coding System (CFCS) and behavioral reactions were scored using the Noncommunicating Children's Pain Checklist (NCCPC). A linear mixed-effects model showed that children's reactions increased between baseline and venipuncture and decreased between the end of venipuncture and the recovery period. There was no significant difference between groups regarding the amount of facial, behavioral and physiological reactions. However, behavioral reactions seemed to remain high in children with ASD after the end of the venipuncture, in contrast with children in the 2 other groups. Moreover, we observed a significant decrease in pain expression with age in nonimpaired children, but no such effect was found regarding children with ASD. The data reveal that children with ASD displayed a significant pain reaction in this situation and tend to recover more slowly after the painful experience. Improvement in pain assessment and management in this population is necessary.

Autism spectrum disorder is associated with an altered early brain development. However, the specific cortical structure abnormalities underlying this disorder remain largely unknown. Nonetheless, atypical cortical folding provides lingering evidence of early disruptions in neurodevelopmental processes and identifying changes in the geometry of cortical sulci is of primary interest for characterizing these structural abnormalities in autism and their evolution over the first stages of brain development. Here, we applied state-of-the-art sulcus-based morphometry methods to a large highly-selective cohort of 73 young male children of age spanning from 18 to 108 months. Moreover, such large cohort was selected through extensive behavioral assessments and stringent inclusion criteria for the group of 59 children with autism. After manual labeling of 59 different sulci in each hemisphere, we computed multiple shape descriptors for each single sulcus element, hereby separating the folding measurement into distinct factors such as the length and depth of the sulcus. We demonstrated that the central, intraparietal and frontal medial sulci showed a significant and consistent pattern of abnormalities across our different geometrical indices. We also found that autistic and control children exhibited strikingly different relationships between age and structural changes in brain morphology. Lastly, the different measures of sulcus shapes were correlated with the CARS and ADOS scores that are specific to the autistic pathology and indices of symptom severity. Inherently, these structural abnormalities are confined to regions that are functionally relevant with respect to cognitive disorders in ASD. In contrast to those previously reported in adults, it is very unlikely that these abnormalities originate from general compensatory mechanisms unrelated to the primary pathology. Rather, they most probably reflect an early disruption on developmental trajectory that could be part of the primary pathology.