Social cognition in children with attention-deficit and hyperactivity disorder: a literature review

Abstract

Children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) present difficulties in social interaction, which can be attributed to deficiencies in social cognition (SC), however, this function has been little studied in this population. To conduct a review of the literature of the last 18 years about CS in children with ADHD, in the subdomains of theory of mind, recognition of emotions in faces, pragmatic language and affective prosody. A search was made in PubMed and Scopus databases, combining the next keywords: “ADHD”, “social cognition”, “theory of mind”, “emotion recognition”, “pragmatic language” and “affective prosody”. Articles were selected from 2000 to 2018. Facial emotion recognition is the most reported SC deficit in ADHD children, being the specific failures in the comprehension of gestures like fear, sadness, happiness and anger, although not in a consistent way. Moreover, deficits are also reported in theory of mind, especially in the social reference, basic emotions comprehension, metarepresentations, second-order inferences and in making complex social judgements.