Abstract
Patients with irritability, temper outbursts, hyperactivity and mood swings often meet the dysregulation profile (DP) of the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL) or the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ), which have been investigated over the past few decades. While the DP has emerged as a transdiagnostic marker with a negative impact on therapeutic outcome and psychosocial functioning, little is known about its underlying mechanisms such as attention and emotion regulation processes. In this study, we tested whether adolescent psychiatric patients (n = 27) with the SDQ-DP show impaired emotional face processing for task-irrelevant stimuli compared to psychiatric patients without the SDQ-DP (n = 30) and non-clinical adolescents (n = 21). Facial processing was tested with event-related potential (ERP) measures known to be modulated by attention (i.e., P1, N1, N170, P2, and Nc) during a modified Attention Network Task, to which task-irrelevant emotional stimuli (sad, fearful, and neutral faces) were added prior to the actual trial. The results reveal group differences in the orienting and in the conflicting network. Patients with DP showed a less efficient orienting network and the clinical control group showed a less efficient conflicting network. Moreover, patients with the dysregulation profile had a shorter N1/N170 latency than did the two control groups, suggesting that dysregulation in adolescents is associated with a faster but less arousing encoding of (task-irrelevant) emotional information and less top-down control.
Highlights
A large proportion of children and adolescents who are referred to clinical treatment present with self-regulation difficulties in emotional, behavioral and cognitive domains (Deutz et al 2018; Holtmann et al 2007)
Participants were assigned to three groups, which were based on the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ)-dysregulation profile scores (SDQ-DP; Goodman et al 1998; Holtmann et al 2011; Deutz et al 2018) and were defined according to Holtmann et al (2011) as follows: Patients scoring 5 or higher on the SDQ-DP were assigned to the clinical group with DP (DPG), whereas patients scoring below this cutoff were assigned to the clinical control group (CCG)
We tested whether task-irrelevant emotional faces have an effect on attentional performance in children and adolescents with dysregulation profile captured by the SDQ, using a modified Attention Network Task (ANT) paradigm and event-related potential (ERP) measures
Summary
A large proportion of children and adolescents who are referred to clinical treatment present with self-regulation difficulties in emotional, behavioral and cognitive domains (Deutz et al 2018; Holtmann et al 2007). These are not unique to a specific diagnostic category Given that the DP is stable over time and across age groups (Carballo et al 2014; Wang et al 2019) and has been related to higher suicide rates, more substance use and higher rates of depression and anxiety disorders when emerging in adulthood (Holtmann et al 2010a; Metzke and Steinhausen 2019), it
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
