The relationship between early and late event-related potentials and temperament in adolescents with and without ADHD

Abstract

Differences in emotional processing are prevalent in adolescents with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and are related to clinical impairment, but substantial heterogeneity exists. Within ADHD, some individuals experience difficulty with positive/approach emotions, negative/withdrawal emotions, or both. These problems may reflect differences in emotional reactivity, emotion regulation, or a combination, and the neurophysiological correlates remain unclear. Event-related potentials were collected from 109 adolescents (49 with ADHD) while they completed an emotional go/no-go task with three conditions: happy (positive/approach), fear (negative/withdrawal), and neutral. The P1 and N170 were used as a marker of early emotional processing and the P3b and late positive potential (LPP) were used as markers of later elaborative emotional processing. Emotional response style was assessed with parent and adolescent report on the Early Adolescent Temperament Questionnaire. There were no effects of emotion or group for the P1. Typically-developing adolescents exhibited a larger N170 to emotional vs. neutral faces while adolescents with ADHD showed the opposite pattern. All adolescents exhibited a larger P3b to fearful versus other faces and a larger LPP to emotional vs. non-emotional faces. Within the ADHD group, N170 responses to happy faces predicted parent ratings of positive/approach emotions. Findings highlight the importance of considering within-group heterogeneity when studying clinical populations and help clarify the time-locked neurophysiological correlates of emotion dysregulation.

Response Inhibition, Response Execution, and Emotion Regulation among Children with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder

“…With respect to differences among youth with and without ADHD, in support of our hypothesis, children with ADHD differed from typically developing youth with respect to performance on the emotional response inhibition task. Specifically, in accordance with prior literature, children with ADHD displayed more errors of omission when averaging across task conditions, suggesting a deficit in the domain of correctly and quickly initiating responses during the task conditions (Alperin et al, 2017;Desman et al, 2008;Wodka et al, 2007). Additionally, children with ADHD demonstrated fewer correct go responses in the context of the emotional task condition compared to typically developing youth.…”

“…Go/no-go task.-Participants completed two conditions of a go/no-go task (described in Alperin et al, 2017;Cservenka, Fair, & Nagel, 2014) using E-Prime software. Each task condition consisted of the presentation of grey-scaled photos of facial stimuli (i.e., NimStim Face Stimulus Set including six females and six males).…”

“…One such study examined response inhibition during an emotional go/no-go task, with three conditions (fear, happy, and neutral), and examined event-related potentials in adolescents with and without ADHD. This study determined that adolescents with ADHD demonstrated fewer correct trials and differential patterns of neural responding, including larger N170 responses indicating greater emotional processing between neutral and emotional faces compared to healthy adolescents (Alperin, Gustafsson, Smith, & Karalunas, 2017). Among children with ADHD, one study examined event-related potentials and utilized letters as stimuli during a go/no-go task presented in three different emotional contexts: neutral, negative and positive (induced via emotional pictures in the background during trials; Lopez-Martin, Albert, Fernandez-Jaen & Carretie, 2015).…”

ADHD-Related Impairments in Error-Processing Predict Symptom Change

“…Methods are also described in Alperin et al (2017). 122 participants were recruited from a larger ongoing longitudinal study to participate in an additional EEG visit onsite.…”

“…EEG recording and data preprocessing were identical to Alperin et al (2017). EEG was recorded at 500Hz with 32 Ag-AgCl active electrodes using PyCorder v1.0.9.…”