Emotion dysregulation and mechanisms in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder

Abstract

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a kind of mental development disorder with high prevalence. Its core symptoms are attention deficit, hyperactivity and impulse.Previous studies mainly focused on the executive function and cognitive control of ADHD. Since emotion dysregulation in ADHD results in a lot of negative consequences, such as social interaction, coping with frustration and parent-child relationship, more and more researchers believe that the lack of emotional regulation ability is likely to be an important reason for ADHD patients' inability to focus attention and hyperactive impulse behavior in recent years.At the behavioral level, ADHD patients' emotion dysregulation is mainly reflected in emotional impulsivity, emotional lability and negative emotionality.At the neurophysiological level, emotion dysregulation in ADHD patients was found to be related to heart rate variability, respiratory sinus arrhythmia, late positive component LPP and activity abnormality of resting state neural network. Some researchers have proposed the cold and hot executive function theory of ADHD, in which the hot regulatory circuit is associated with the processing the emotional regulation process. Future studies are needed to explore the maintaining difficulty and inducing positive emotion in ADHD, and the influence of comorbidities in ADHD. Moreover, researchers should combine neurophysiological method and family study to clarify the brain mechanism and its genetic basis underlying emotion dysregulation in ADHD patients. Key words: Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder; Emotion regulation; Impulsivity; Inhibition; Brain mechanism