Symposia
ADHD - Child
Daniel A. Waschbusch, Ph.D.
Professor
Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center
Hershey, Pennsylvania
Background: Social information processing (SIP) refers to how children encode and interpret social interactions (Dodge, 1986). Children with attention or behavior problems encode fewer social cues, infer hostile intent in peers, generate aggressive responses to social problems, and select aggression as a response to social conflict (Dodge & Coie, 1987). Little research has examined the role of callous-unemotional (CU) traits in these findings. This study examined the SIP of elementary school-age children as a function of ADHD, ODD or CD (conduct problems; CP), and CU traits. It was hypothesized that children with ADHDCP-only would display aggressive SIP whereas children with ADHDCP-CU would not.
Methods: Participants were 122 children (29 girls, 93 boys) ages 6.7 to 12.8 years old (M = 9.5, SD = 1.7) with an IQ of 75 or higher. Parents and teacher ratings of ADHD, CP, and CU were used to sort children into four groups: typically developing (TD), ADHD-only, ADHDCP-only, or ADHDCP-CU. Children completed two SIP tasks, including one task that used pictures and stories and a second that used videos. Tasks measured cue encoding, attributions of intent, response generation, and response evaluation. Data were analyzed using generalized estimating equations with unstructured covariance for the repeated measures. Group was the focal predictor and story type, age, sex, and IQ were covariates. A negative binomial model with a log link was used for count data and a linear model with an identity link was used for continuous data.
Results. Children with ADHD, regardless of co-occurring conditions, detected fewer social cues (p = .036), were more disorganized in presenting social cues (p = .013), and identified fewer relevant social cues (p = .058) than did typically developing controls. Children with ADHD and CP, regardless of CU, generated more aggressive responses on the picture task (p = .0049) and video task (p = .007) than did typically developing children or children with ADHD.
Discussion: Results are broadly consistent with diagnostic conceptualizations; children with ADHD were less attentive to social cues and children with conduct problems were more likely to generate aggressive responses. Surprisingly, conduct problem children with and without CU traits did not differ. These results provide guidance for interventions designed to improve social cognitive deficits in children with ADHD and/or CP, which may improve their peer functioning.