Emotion Dysregulation May Not Be Solely Attributed to ADHD

The article “Emotion Regulation in Adolescent Males with Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder: Testing the Effects of Comorbid Conduct Disorder” was written by Northover, C., Thapar, A., Langley, K., and Goozen, S. The researchers’ essentially state that although attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) has often been associated with emotion dysregulation, it is not a unique characteristic of ADHD. Since few studies have actually experimentally investigated this while considering the effects of comorbid conduct disorder (CD), emotion dysregulation may not actually be a core trait of ADHD. CD is a psychological disorder within children or adolescents that is characterized by a range of problematic behaviors, including defiant behaviors and antisocial activities. Overall, this article does well in informing the reader while trying to reform the original view of ADHD.

This present study has taken the initiative in comparing adolescent boys with ADHD, ADHD + CD, and typical controls by using an economic decision-making game known as the Ultimatum Game (UG). The UG is a way of measuring emotion regulation by analyzing its effects on decision-making. This involved two players with an opportunity to split a total of 10 points, one being the proposer and the other being the responder. The offers varied in fairness, allowing the contribution of ADHD and CD symptom scores to the acceptance levels of unfair offers, to be analyzed. A total of 231 participants were recruited and categorized into four groups. These groups included ADHD, ADHD with low aggressive CD symptoms, ADHD with high aggressive CD symptoms, and a control. There was no significant difference in acceptance rates between groups for the fair offers and the highly unfair offers. However, the groups differed significantly for the moderately unfair offers. The group with ADHD and high aggressive CD symptoms were found to have rejected significantly more moderately unfair offers. Ultimately the results and the analysis suggest that it’s the subgroup of boys with ADHD and high aggressive CD that has trouble regulating emotion, which results in more “irrational” decisions. Another important outcome was that the group with only ADHD didn’t differ from the control group in performance on the task.

This article was quite clear and thorough in explaining the idea behind the common association of emotion dysregulation to ADHD, as well as the arguments for and against it.

Several issues within this study can be found however. The study only focused on male adolescents rather than both male and female; therefore the results may not necessarily be extended to all children with ADHD.

The study also didn’t normalize the number of samples per group. The four groups consisted of 47, 90, 64, and 30 participants. Although in certain experiments the samples per group isn’t always standardized, the lower number of 30 participants within the ADHD with high aggressive CD symptoms group that produced the statistically different results might have affected the significance.

Despite these issues, there is a sufficient amount of evidence in support of the idea that emotion dysregulation is not attributed to ADHD alone. Those who are interested in learning more about ADHD, UG, and how emotion dysregulation affects adolescents are encouraged to read the full article.

As a result of this recent article, we can better understand that those who are diagnosed with ADHD don’t necessarily have an underlying problem with regulating emotion too. Those with only ADHD provided the same results as those in the control group, showing that their decision-making in the UG sense is very similar to the rest of us. With these findings and results, the article contributes important information that calls for further investigation within this field.

Literature Cited

Northover, C., Thapar, A., Langley, K., & Goozen, S. (2015). Emotion Regulation in Adolescent Males with Attention-Deficit       Hyperactivity Disorder: Testing the Effects of Comorbid Conduct Disorder. Brain Sciences, 5(3), 369-386.