Social cognition in ADHD: irony understanding and recursive theory of mind.

The main goal of the present study was to characterise the social cognition abilities of French children with ADHD, in terms of their understanding of people's recursive mental states and their irony comprehension. We hypothesised that these children have difficulty understanding second-order false beliefs and ironic remarks, owing to the executive dysfunction that is characteristic of ADHD. We therefore conducted an experiment in which children with ADHD and typically developing matched controls performed second-order false-belief and executive function tasks.