Increased pupil dilation to happy faces in children with hyperactive/impulsive symptoms of ADHD

Abstract

Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is associated with disrupted emotional processes including impaired regulation of approach behavior and positive affect, irritability, and anger. Enhanced reactivity to emotional cues may be an underlying process. Pupil dilation is an indirect index of arousal, modulated by the autonomic nervous system and activity in the locus coeruleus-noradrenergic system. In the current study, pupil dilation was recorded while 8- to 12- year old children (n = 71, 26 with a diagnosis of ADHD and 45 typically developing), viewed images of emotional faces. Parent-rated hyperactive/impulsive symptoms were uniquely linked to higher pupil dilation to happy, but not fearful, angry, or neutral faces. This was not explained by comorbid externalizing symptoms. Together, these results suggest that hyperactive/impulsive symptoms are associated with hyperresponsiveness to approach-related emotional cues across a wide range of symptom severity.

Williams syndrome: Reduced attention to other’s eyes in a hypersocial phenotype

“…The first group (n = 39, mean age 12 years, SD = 2.64) was initially recruited from a database of families expressing interest in participating in developmental research and included as a control group in studies of ADHD. Details about the sample are reported in previous publications [47,48]. The second group (n = 41; mean age 14.28, SD = 2.43) were recruited from the Swedish tax registry (for details about the sample, see [35]) and initially included as a control group in a study on social anxiety disorder.…”

Restricted visual scanpaths during emotion recognition in childhood social anxiety disorder

“…Groups were matched on age and gender (Table 1). The sample is partly overlapping with the group studied by Kleberg et al (2020), where data from another experiment are reported.…”

“…Gaps in the data shorter than 150 ms were replaced through linear interpolation and subsequently filtered by a moving median filter corresponding to 80 ms. A pupil dilation response was calculated for each trial and defined as the mean proportional change in pupil size during stimulus presentation relative to baseline pupil size. As in previous studies (Kleberg, Frick, & Brocki, 2020;Kleberg et al, 2019), the initial increase in pupil size after stimulus onset that can largely be attributed to changes in screen luminance was discarded. Based on visual inspection of the data, pupil dilation response was defined as the mean pupil size during the 1500-4000 ms interval (see Supplementary materials, Figure S3).…”

“…So far, a small number of eye-tracking studies have been conducted in children and adolescents with SAD (Högström et al, 2019;Schmidtendorf et al, 2018;Keil et al, 2018;Kleberg et al, 2017;Capriola-Hall et al, 2020;Kleberg et al, 2020). These studies examined the relative distribution of attention between threat-related faces and other stimuli during free viewing tasks.…”

“…Results from free-viewing tasks are inconclusive, with reports of both avoidance (Keil et al, 2018;Kleberg et al, 2017), prolonged monitoring of threat (Capriola-Hall et al, 2020;Kleberg et al, 2020) and age-typical allocation of attention (Högström et al, 2019). Previous studies are limited by small sample sizes, typically ranging between 20-35 individuals (for reviews, see (J.…”