Abstract
In this study we used event-related brain potentials (ERP) as neural markers of cognitive operations to examine emotion and attentional processing in a population of high-risk adolescents with mental health problems that included attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), anxiety, and depression. We included a healthy control group for comparison purposes, and employed a modified version of the emotional oddball paradigm, consisting of frequent distracters (scrambled pictures), infrequent distracters (sad, fearful, and neutral pictures), and infrequent targets (circles). Participants were instructed to make a right hand button press to targets and a left hand button press to all other stimuli. EEG/ERP recordings were taken using a high-density 256-channel recording system. Behavioral data showed that for both clinical and non-clinical adolescents, reaction time (RT) was slowest in response to the fearful images. Electrophysiological data differentiated emotion and target processing between clinical and non-clinical adolescents. In the clinical group we observed a larger P100 and late positive potential (LPP) in response to fearful compared to sad or neutral pictures. There were no differences in these ERPs in the healthy sample. Emotional modulation of target processing was also identified in the clinical sample, where we observed an increase in P300 amplitude, and a larger sustained LPP in response to targets that followed emotional pictures (fear and sad) compared to targets that followed neutral pictures or other targets. There were no differences in these target ERPs for the healthy participants. Taken together, we suggest that these data provide important and novel evidence of affective and attention dysfunction in this clinical population of adolescents, and offer an example of the disruptive effects of emotional reactivity on basic cognition.
Highlights
Emotion can both enhance and impair cognition and performance (Dolcos et al, 2011; Chan and Singhal, 2013)
There were no differences between clinical (n = 10) and non-clinical adolescents (n = 6) in reaction time (RT) to distracters, F(1, 14) = 0.004, p = 0.95, or the Distracter Type × Group interaction, F(2, 28) = 0.05, p = 0.86
Overall we observed an interesting pattern of behavioral (RT) and neural responses (P100, late positive potential (LPP), and P300) that showed similarities and differences (i.e., event-related brain potentials (ERP) data) in emotion and attentional processing between clinical and non-clinical samples
Summary
Emotion can both enhance and impair cognition and performance (Dolcos et al, 2011; Chan and Singhal, 2013). Increased attention to emotional stimuli can lead to distracting effects on cognitive performance if the emotional information is task-irrelevant (Dolcos and McCarthy, 2006; Shafer et al, 2012). These opposing effects of emotion are exacerbated in clinical conditions, such as depression and anxiety, where increased emotional distractibility is observed. The neural basis of emotion regulation has received considerable research interest because of the compelling argument that certain types of psychopathology are linked to a fundamental dysregulation in emotion processing (Davidson, 2002; Phillips et al, 2008) This dysregulation has been described as involving an imbalance between basic affective processing and higher-level executive processes including top– down attentional control (Johnson et al, 2005). In pediatric populations emotion regulation is likely of paramount
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