Medical Student Research Forum Posters

People with ADHD experience emotional regulation deficits,1 associated with greater functional impairment2. We used an Emotional Go/No-Go Task (EGNG), a modified Go/NoGo paradigm with emotional faces (happy, fear, anger) used as distractors to compare the effect of emotion regulation on response inhibition in ADHD compared to a matched typically developing (TD) group3. Previous work in ADHD-EGNG performance found that both ADHD and TD groups make significantly more omission errors (failing to respond during a go trial) when viewing fearful stimuli compared to neutral stimuli and that ADHD participants make significantly fewer commission errors (inappropriately responding during a no-go trial) when viewing fearful stimuli compared to neutral stimuli4. However, previous work only looked at one or two types of emotional stimuli alongside a neutral stimuli. The present work compares ADHD and TD performance on an EGNG paradigm incorporating three emotions (happy, fear, & anger) alongside nonemotional baseline stimuli to determine if participants with ADHD experience differential emotional regulation when exposed to different types of positive and negative emotional stimuli. We hypothesized ADHD participants would commit more omission and commission errors than TD participants especially on negative emotional stimuli.