How do Young People with ADHD Perceive their Condition: An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is one the most prevalent of childhood diagnoses. There is limited research available from the perspective of the child or young person with ADHD. The current research explored how young people perceive ADHD. A secondary aim of the study was to explore to what extent they identify with ADHD. Five participants took part in this study. Their views were explored using semi-structured interviews guided by methods from Personal Construct Psychology. The data was analysed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). Data analysis suggests that the young people’s views of ADHD are complex and, at times, contradictory. Four super-ordinate themes were identified: What is ADHD?, The role and impact of others on the experience of ADHD, Identity conflict and My relationship with ADHD. The young people’s contradictory views on ADHD are reflective of portrayals of ADHD in the media. A power imbalance was also identified where the young people perceive that they play a passive role in the management of their treatment. Finally, the young people’s accounts revealed a variety of approaches taken to make sense of their condition.

Face matching impairment in developmental prosopagnosia

Developmental prosopagnosia (DP) is commonly referred to as ‘face blindness’, a term that implies a perceptual basis to the condition. However, DP presents as a deficit in face recognition and is diagnosed using memory-based tasks. Here, we test face identification ability in six people with DP, who are severely impaired on face memory tasks, using tasks that do not rely on memory. First, we compared DP to control participants on a standardised test of unfamiliar face matching using facial images taken on the same day and under standardised studio conditions (Glasgow Face Matching Test; GFMT). DP participants did not differ from normative accuracy scores on the GFMT. Second, we tested face matching performance on a test created using images that were sourced from the Internet and so vary substantially due to changes in viewing conditions and in a person’s appearance (Local Heroes Test; LHT). DP participants show significantly poorer matching accuracy on the LHT relative to control participants, for both unfamiliar and familiar face matching. Interestingly, this deficit is specific to ‘match’ trials, suggesting that people with DP may have particular difficulty in matching images of the same person that contain natural day-to-day variations in appearance. We discuss these results in the broader context of individual differences in face matching ability.