ADHD is one of the most common neurodevelopmental disorders during childhood. Recent experimental findings have shown that in addition to executive dysfunction, there would be significant dysfunction in the affective domain.  This study seeks to elucidate the nature of the emotion recognition impairment reported in adults with ADHD and its neural correlate in the auditory domain.  In this study, a group of adult controls and a group of adults diagnosed with ADHD were evaluated. Both groups performed an FM tone AER task specially designed for this study.  At both behavioral and electrophysiological levels, it was hypothesized that adults diagnosed with ADHD showed an impairment in AER, compared to the control group.  These results show that there is a modulation in the neural response for auditory emotional recognition, both in terms of evoked response and in phase synchrony.  This modulation is observed for both groups. A significant neural hypoactivation is evident, in evoked and synchronous activity, both at the early and late levels, MMN and N1-P3a, in fronto-central areas, for emotional stimuli of negative valence (anger). This study of the affective domain of ADHD will provide us with new knowledge about this condition and its manifestation in adulthood, as well as a new avenue to seek the development of endophenotypes and biomarkers. The results of this work have the potential to contribute to the improvement of care for adult patients with ADHD, their diagnosis, choice of treatment and evaluation of therapies.

Johanna Kreither is a Certified Clinical Psychologist with a PhD in Psychology from the University of Chile and postdoctoral fellowships in Cognitive Neuroscience and Experimental Therapeutics from the University of California Davis and Columbia University, New York. She is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Psychology at the University of Talca, Chile, where she has taught undergraduate and graduate courses in psychology, focusing on topics in Translational Neuroscience with applications to Clinical Psychology. Her research and studies seek to integrate basic, clinical, and applied research with concomitant recordings of behaviors and neurophysiological correlates, strengthening Translational Associative Research on Cognitive, Affective, and Neural Processes for diagnostic and therapeutic advancement in clinical populations. She has been serving as an editorial board member of several reputed journals.