Wang Jiaqi, Chen Yan, Zhang Yue'e, Cai Shizhong, Wang Aijun, Zhang Ming
Department of Psychology, Research Center for Psychology and Behavioral Sciences, Soochow University, Suzhou, China.
Department of Child and Adolescent Healthcare, Children's Hospital of Soochow University, Suzhou, China.
Cogn Process. 2025 May;26(2):389-399. doi: 10.1007/s10339-024-01241-w. Epub 2024 Nov 5.
Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a common neurodevelopmental disorder in children. Previous studies have shown that children with ADHD have impaired processing of emotional stimuli, but it is unclear whether their ability to integrate multimodal emotional stimuli is impaired and at which processing pathway this impairment exists. The present study investigated the ability of children with ADHD to integrate emotional audiovisual stimuli under different emotional conditions, and the effect of audiovisual integration on IOR to reveal the impaired processing pathway of their emotional audiovisual integration. Fifty-eight school-age children (29 with ADHD and 29 matched typically developing (TD) children) performed an emotional valence discrimination task with a cue-target paradigm. The results showed that children with ADHD did not exhibit audiovisual integration of emotional stimuli in all experimental conditions. In addition, the IOR effect was significantly smaller for audiovisual targets than for visual targets under the negative but not the neutral emotion condition in children with ADHD, whereas this effect was present in all emotion conditions in TD children. These results indicate that the ability to integrate emotional audiovisual information is impaired in children with ADHD and this impairment exists in both bottom-up and top-down pathways. Additionally, although presenting emotional auditory stimuli at the same time as emotional faces reduced IOR both in children with ADHD and TD, the manner of reduction differed. These findings provide new evidence of emotional processing deficits and multimodal integration deficits in children with ADHD, and help provide support for children in educational settings.
注意缺陷多动障碍（ADHD）是儿童中常见的神经发育障碍。先前的研究表明，患有ADHD的儿童在处理情绪刺激方面存在障碍，但尚不清楚他们整合多模态情绪刺激的能力是否受损以及这种损伤存在于哪个处理途径中。本研究调查了患有ADHD的儿童在不同情绪条件下整合情绪视听刺激的能力，以及视听整合对IOR的影响，以揭示其情绪视听整合的受损处理途径。58名学龄儿童（29名患有ADHD，29名匹配的发育正常（TD）儿童）采用线索-目标范式进行了情绪效价辨别任务。结果表明，患有ADHD的儿童在所有实验条件下均未表现出情绪刺激的视听整合。此外，在负性情绪而非中性情绪条件下，患有ADHD的儿童视听目标的IOR效应明显小于视觉目标，而在TD儿童中，这种效应在所有情绪条件下均存在。这些结果表明，患有ADHD的儿童整合情绪视听信息的能力受损，且这种损伤存在于自下而上和自上而下的途径中。此外，尽管在患有ADHD的儿童和TD儿童中，同时呈现情绪性听觉刺激和情绪性面孔都会降低IOR，但降低的方式有所不同。这些发现为患有ADHD的儿童情绪处理缺陷和多模态整合缺陷提供了新的证据，并有助于在教育环境中为儿童提供支持。
