Exploring Social Information Processing of Emotion Content and its Relationship with Social Outcomes in Children at-risk for Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorde

Children with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) often experience social and emotional impairments. However, there has been limited success in reducing these impairments and increasing social status through behavioral and pharmacological interventions. A fruitful avenue may be identifying the atypical social and emotional information processes that contribute to the impairments and subsequently developing interventions that target impaired, yet malleable processes. Using social information processing (SIP) theory as a guide, indicators of social and emotional processing and the relationship between these processes and social outcomes were examined. Specifically, cue encoding, cue interpretation, and latency to emotion recognition in children with or at-risk for ADHD and children without ADHD were investigated. Participants were 72 children (aged 8-14; 59.7% male; 61.1% Non-Hispanic White), 24 in the ADHD group and 48 in the control group. The SIP tasks included cue encoding, measured via emotion recognition during a face morphing task, and cue encoding and interpretation during a television episode. Significant differences in performance between the ADHD and control groups were not found on any of the SIP tasks. Further, performance on SIP tasks was related to measures of social skill, but not to measures of social impairment. Implications for future research with children with ADHD are discussed.