**Abstract**

**Objectives**：Impairment in facial emotion recognition and facial emotion discrimination is established findings in autism spectrum disorders(ASD). And children with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) also experience significant difficulty in recognizing and discriminating facial emotion. this study aimed to investigate the differences in facial emotion recognition and emotion discrimination between children with ADHD and ASD children.

**Methods**: 53 children, aged 7 to 11 years participated in this study. Among them, 42 children were diagnosed with ADHD and 11 children were diagnosed with ASD. We examined the ability to recognize facial emotion expression by using Penn Emotion Recognition Task (ER40) and we measured ability to discriminate facial emotional intensity by using Penn Emotion Discrimination Task(EDF40).

**Results**: ADHD children were found to have better ability than ASD children in the recognition of happy and sad faces, but there was no significant difference in the recognition of angry, fear, and no emotion faces between two groups. Also, ADHD children recognized facial emotion expression better than ASD children when they shown female faces, but We found no significant difference between two groups when they shown male face. And ADHD children showed better ability than ASD children in the recognition of intense emotion expression but there was no significant difference in the recognition of mild emotional expression between two groups. We found no statistically significant difference in the discrimination of facial emotional intensity between the children with ADHD and ASD children.

**Conclusion**: The results of our study suggested that children with ADHD have better ability in facial emotion recognition than children with ASD, yet have deficit in facial emotional intensity discrimination equal to children with ASD.
