Atypical neural responses to vocal anger in attention‐deficit/hyperactivity disorder

Abstract

• Responses to expressions of hostility by others may be altered in children with ADHD because they have difficulties in recognising negative emotions.• In this, the first study of its kind, we used electrophysiological methods to study brain event-related potentials of children with ADHD in response to angry, happy and neutral vocal expressions.• Compared to controls, children with ADHD displayed significant N100 enhancement and P300 attenuation to angry relative to neutral voices.• This pattern of results provides new evidence that very early stages of emotion processing are implicated in ADHD.• Future research should test the hypothesis that the N100 component is a marker for automatic hyper-orientation to vocal threat stimuli in ADHD.3 Abstract Background: Deficits in facial emotion processing, reported in attention-deficit/hyperactivity

The familial basis of facial emotion recognition deficits in adolescents with conduct disorder and their unaffected relatives

“…Finally, although we assessed both facial identity and facial emotion recognition in the current study, just one task was used to measure emotion recognition. Accordingly, future studies could employ multiple tests of emotion recognition (including vocal emotion processing; Chronaki et al 2014) to provide comprehensive information about emotion recognition deficits in CD probands and their unaffected relatives.…”

Event-Related Potentials and Emotion Processing in Child Psychopathology

“…The only ERP study to date using vocal stimuli has shown enhanced N100 and attenuated P300 amplitudes to vocal anger in 6–11-years-old with ADHD in an emotion recognition task using pure prosodic stimuli ( Chronaki et al, 2015a ). The N100 effect persisted after excluding children with comorbid Conduct Disorder.…”

Brain mechanisms involved in angry prosody change detection in school-age children and adults, revealed by electrophysiology

“…Despite the behavioral evidence of emotional prosody discrimination in early childhood, ERP studies in young children have provided surprising results. Although the processing of emotional cues affects early obligatory ERP components (e.g., N1, P2) in adults, no such effects have been observed in children (Chronaki, Benikos, Fairchild, & Sonuga-Barke, 2014;Chronaki et al, 2012). Instead, ERP amplitude difference between angry and neutral prosody have been reported at late latency ranges around 400 ms in infants and children (Chronaki et al, 2012;Grossmann, Striano, & Friederici, 2005).…”