<p>The present study was designed to investigate the impairments in visual search performance for emotional faces among children with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). A total of 41 children with ADHD and 35 typically developing children participated in a variable target search task. The task involved presenting 9 facial images arranged in a 3 × 3 matrix. Participants were instructed to identify whether a face with a different emotional expression was present. In target trials, a happy/angry face was embedded in 8 identical neutral or angry/happy faces; in non-target trials, all 9 faces displayed the same neutral, happy, or angry expression. ADHD symptoms were assessed using two parental report scales: Conners’ Parent Rating Scale (CPRS) and the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL). The results showed that children with ADHD had a significantly lower accuracy rate in the search task compared to their non-ADHD counterparts. For the non-ADHD group, response times for targets with emotional distractors were significantly shorter than those with neutral distractors, whereas no such difference was observed in the ADHD group. In addition, several significant negative correlations were identified in the ADHD group between ADHD-related symptoms (i.e., impulsivity/hyperactivity and ADHD index scores on the CPRS) and task performance indicators (i.e., accuracy rate, reaction time). No similar correlations were found in the non-ADHD group. These results suggest that children with ADHD exhibit abnormalities in the visual search for emotional faces. Our findings contribute novel evidence to reveal the emotional processing deficits in children with ADHD.</p>