Emotion regulation and the behavioral and neural correlates of adolescents with mental health disorders
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In this study, I looked at how a clinical group emotionally processes and regulates when presented with an emotional oddball task. A clinical group, ages 12 to 17, with mental health disorders including attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), conduct disorder (CD) and affective disorders, was compared to a healthy control group, 12 to 17 years old, in order to assess behavioral and neuropsychophysiological differences in response to emotional information presented. Using a modified emotional oddball paradigm, which contained emotional pictures (i.e., distracter type: fear, neutral, sad) and non-emotional pictures called targets (i.e., target type: target-after-fear, target-after-neutral, target-after-sad, and target-after-target), participants were asked to respond with a right hand button press to targets (i.e., circles) and a left hand button press for all other stimuli. Reaction time (i.e., RT) was recorded for all participants. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were also recorded via a high density 256-channel recording system. Statistical comparisons were made between the two groups for behavioral (i.e., RT) data , 42 participants for the clinical group and 17 participants for the healthy control group, and ERP (i.e., P300) data, 35 participants for the clinical group and 13 participants for the healthy control group. Both clinical and control groups responded slower to fear distracters than neutral or sad distracters. There was no significant differences between the clinical and control groups for RT or ERPs (i.e., P300) for target types. We suggest that this study has the potential to elucidate emotion processing and emotion regulation information for adolescents with clinical disorders, but possibly due to the large variability of mental health disorders, the differences were not made apparent statistically. KEYWORDS: Emotion regulation, emotional oddball paradigm, affective disorder, ADHD, CD, ERPs, P300