Developmental Clinical Psychology Research Unit, Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland.
Department of Mental Health and Psychiatry, Service of Psychiatric Specialties, University Hospitals of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland.
Psychopathology. 2024;57(2):91-101. doi: 10.1159/000531512. Epub 2023 Aug 16.
Growing, albeit heterogenous evidence questions whether attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is associated with socio-cognitive impairments, especially beyond childhood. This study focuses on mentalizing - the socio-cognitive ability to attribute and reason in terms of mental states. We aimed to characterize mentalizing performance in terms of correct scores and types of errors in adolescents and young adults with ADHD.
Forty-nine adolescents and adults with ADHD and 49 healthy controls matched for age and gender completed a computerized naturalistic mentalizing task, the Movie for Assessment of Social Cognition (MASC). Repeated measures analyses of variance examined the effects of age group and ADHD diagnosis on MASC performance. Additionally, associations between mentalizing scores, the severity of attention problems, and the presence of comorbidity were explored in the ADHD group.
Results showed an increased prevalence of hypomentalizing errors in adolescents with ADHD. Lower mentalizing scores in adolescents with ADHD were correlated with indices of inattentiveness, impulsivity, and vigilance problems. Hypomentalizing errors in adolescents showed to be particularly associated with inattentiveness, after controlling for age and comorbidity. In contrast, adults with ADHD performed similarly to controls and their scores on the mentalizing task were not correlated to attention problems.
These findings highlight potential developmental differences in mentalizing abilities in ADHD youths and their association with attentional impairments.
越来越多的证据表明，注意力缺陷/多动障碍（ADHD）与社会认知障碍有关，尽管这些证据存在差异，尤其是在儿童期之后。本研究专注于心理理论——一种归因和以心理状态推理的社会认知能力。我们旨在描述 ADHD 青少年和年轻人的心理理论表现，包括正确得分和错误类型。
49 名 ADHD 青少年和成年人以及 49 名年龄和性别匹配的健康对照组完成了一项计算机化的自然主义心理理论任务，即电影社会认知评估（MASC）。重复测量方差分析考察了年龄组和 ADHD 诊断对 MASC 表现的影响。此外，在 ADHD 组中还探讨了心理理论得分与注意力问题严重程度和合并症之间的相关性。
结果表明，ADHD 青少年的低心理理论错误发生率增加。ADHD 青少年的心理理论得分较低与注意力不集中、冲动和警觉问题的指数相关。在控制年龄和合并症后，青少年的低心理理论错误与注意力不集中尤其相关。相比之下，ADHD 成年人的表现与对照组相似，他们在心理理论任务上的得分与注意力问题无关。
这些发现强调了 ADHD 青少年心理理论能力的潜在发展差异及其与注意力障碍的关联。
