中華心理衛生協會

Purpose: The aim of this study is to examine whether emotion interference deficits arise from a lack of attention resources or from an attentional bias in children and adolescents with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Methods: A total of 111 children with ADHD (mean age = 11.9 ± 2.18) and 81 normally developed children (mean age = 11.9 ± 2.32) in North Taiwan completed a go/no go task comprised of various emotional faces (happy, neutral, and angry) with and without reward manipulation. Results: The children with ADHD had more omission errors, slower mean reaction times (RT), and a larger RT standardized deviation (RTSD) than the normally developed group. These results suggest that the participants with ADHD have a significant deficiency in attention performance. Furthermore, the interaction effects between emotion and group were significant, in that the ADHD group demonstrated more commission errors and a greater RTSD for the positive emotion stimulus. In other words, the positive emotion stimulus was responsible for the emotion interference deficit in the ADHD group. The interaction effects among group, emotional face, and reward were not significant, indicating that the reward improved attention performance, rather than reducing the emotion interference deficit in participants with ADHD. Conclusions: The emotion interference deficits among children with ADHD come from emotional attentional bias to a positive emotion stimulus, and not from a paucity of attention resources.