Sara Damasco

Date of Award

2023

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Natural Sciences

First Advisor

Casto, Kathleen

Area of Concentration

Biopsychology

Abstract

Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a condition of executive dysfunction. Research has increasingly identified social impairment in some ADHD people, although the underlying cause is not clear. Socioemotional processing is mediated most directly by the perception of emotional cues from others, most notably recognizing and processing facial cues. Several studies suggest that patients with ADHD show deficits in interoceptive awareness or are less aware of their internal bodily states in addition to deficits in emotional self-awareness. Emotion perception and emotional self-awareness are empirically linked by empathy and social mirroring; these phenomena rely on embodied cognition, the use of one’s body states to represent concepts and feelings. Evidence suggests that one’s facial expression provides feedback relevant to interpreting observed emotional expressions and internal emotional experiences. The connection between facial feedback and interoceptive awareness raises the possibility that the link between embodied state and emotional perception may be disrupted in some people with ADHD. Here, I probed the relationship between facial feedback and emotional perception in people with and without significant ADHD symptomatology. Further, I used functional near-infrared spectroscopy to examine lateral frontal activation in related behavioral conditions to examine the connection between emotional perception and executive function. Subjects performed behavioral tasks in two distinct phases. In the first phase, conditions 1-3, each subject was tasked with identifying emoticon faces with various valences, including happy, sad, and neutral. In the second phase, conditions 4–7, subjects were tasked with identifying emoticon faces with the valences of happy or sad while undergoing facial manipulation to cause them to unwittingly make a happy or sad face themselves in both congruent (happy-happy and sad-sad) and incongruent (happy-sad and sad-happy) conditions. Regarding frontal activation, there were no group differences between ADHD (N = 13) and Non-ADHD (N = 8) groups, related to embodiment or congruence. While the results of this study did not show the hypothesized behavioral differences in emotional processing between ADHD and control subjects, multiple repeated measures ANOVA demonstrated strong evidence of valence( p < .001***) predicting response time, regardless of congruence or ADHD status. Exploratory analyses revealed a significant increase in neural activity when embodiment was incongruent during the condition of happy vs sad in the ADHD group, but not in the Control group; but no significant difference between groups was found under the same conditions when embodiment was congruent. Suggesting that on some level the effect of facial manipulation in incongruent conditions enhanced frontal neural activity in ADHD participants, possibly due to increased cognitive costs involved with the embodied unconscious complexity. ADHD may elicit deficits in the interoception of intrinsic emotional awareness and externalizing behavioral responses; understanding the brain mechanisms that cause significant differences in how emotion interacts with cognition and the role of individual differences in mediating these interactions is crucial to developing new treatments for ADHD.

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