Emotional interference control and emotional conflict adaptation in children and adolescents with ADHD

Emotion dysregulation is common in youth with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and is associated with social impairment-basic regulatory processes in a socio-emotional context in youth with ADHD may account for this relationship. Emotional interference control and emotional conflict adaptation are two such processes. The first process refers to selectively attending to relevant emotional stimuli while ignoring irrelevant emotional information. The second process refers to the ability to take previous experience in a conflicting emotional context (e.g., conflict between one's facial emotional expression and verbal information) in order to resolve current emotional conflicts (e.g., attending to facial emotional expression while ignoring verbal cues). The current study examined emotional interference control and emotional conflict adaptation in children and adolescents with and without ADHD.

Twenty children and adolescents with ADHD and 20 without ADHD between the ages of 9 to 15 years performed an emotional Stroop task in which they were instructed to identify the emotion of facial expressions (happy or angry) while ignoring the overlapping words ("happy" or "anger") that were either congruent or incongruent with the facial expressions. Emotional interference control was measured by subtracting reaction time on congruent trials from incongruent trials. Emotional conflict adaptation was measured by subtracting reaction time on postcongruent incongruent (cI) trials from postincongruent incongruent (iI) trials.

Children and adolescents with ADHD showed significantly lower accuracy on incongruent trials compared to those without ADHD. Within-group analyses indicated that both groups showed slower and less accurate responses on incongruent relative to congruent trials, suggesting an interference effect without evidence of a speed-accuracy trade-off. No group differences were observed in emotional conflict adaptation.

Emotional interference control, but not emotional conflict adaptation, was impaired in our sample of youth with ADHD. Further research should investigate emotional interference control as a mechanism involved with emotion dysregulation symptoms in a social context among youth with ADHD.