A Behavioural and Electrophysiological Exploration of the Effect of Vocal Emotion on Visual Spatial Attention in Adolescents with Traits of Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder

Abstract

Accurate recognition of emotions from vocal expressions is associated with emotion regulation and social competence in children and adolescents (Lemerise & Arsenio, 2000; Crick & Dodge, 1994). Emotion dysregulation is highly prevalent in individuals with ADHD (Shaw et al., 2014), who also display vocal emotion recognition (VER) difficulties (Sells et al., 2023). However, it is debated whether VER difficulties in ADHD reflect generic attention deficits, in favour of cognitive-behavioral theories (Barkley, 1997, 2012) or specific perceptual processing atypicalities in favour of motivational-dysregulation (Sonuga-Barke, 2012) and socio-cognitive models (Lemerise & Arsenio, 2000). This thesis aimed to contribute to this theoretical debate within the literature. Chapter One introduces the vocal emotion processing literature and the theoretical debates in ADHD. Chapter Two presents a systematic review of the VER literature and provides meta-analytic evidence for the presence of generic VER deficits in ADHD. However, a gap in the literature was identified to more robustly examine the potential presence of specific perceptual processing atypicalities in ADHD using preattentive paradigms and neuroimaging measures. Therefore, the present thesis aimed to disentangle a) the preattentive processing of vocal emotion from b) the capture of attention by vocal emotion in ADHD using a novel emotional spatial cueing (ESC) paradigm. Chapter Three presents a study which successfully validated a set of vocal emotional stimuli in adults and adolescents. Chapter Four presents four experiments which validated the ESC paradigm using reaction times, and event-related potential (ERP) measures in adults. This study isolated the Cue-P2 component as a neural marker of preattentive vocal emotion processing in adults. Finally, Chapter Five provides evidence for a positive association between the neural marker of preattentive vocal emotion processing and traits of ADHD (inattention and hyperactivity) in a community sample of 60 adolescents. This is the first study to provide evidence for a preattentive hypersensitivity to vocal emotion in ADHD, in favour of motivational-dysfunction theories (Sonuga-Barke, 2012).