Emotion Dysregulation In ADD Children And Its Relationship With Executive Function

Emotional difficulty is one of the major deficits in children with Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), the main underlying mechanism of which is emotion dysregulation that manifests as disability in emotional control. Besides, inhibitory control is the primary deficit in ADD. Previous researches and theories have suggested that emotion dysregulation of ADD children might be related to their deficits in executive function which reflects disinhibition. And making analyze on two elements of executive function, cold and hot, may increase our understanding of emotion dysregulation in ADD children. In addition, ADD children may show different performance in emotion dysregulation between negative and positive situations for the distinct mechanism of two kinds of emotion. Thus, this study focused on emotion dysregulation in ADD children in negative and positive situations and investigated its relationship with cold and hot executive function.Pupils in grade four of two primary schools in Shanghai were recruited as samples.41 ADD and 41 parallel children were selected as subjects through Conners Teacher Rating Scale and the Test of Everyday Attention for Children (TEA-Ch). In study one, children were evaluated by cold executive function tests including the Sustained Attention to Response Task (SART) and Stroop Task, hot executive function tests including Iowa Gambling Task and Delay Discounting, and an emotion test named competitive puzzle task. Considering that interference factors may be brought in by different experimental paradigms, a new experimental design based on an executive function paradigm was employed to discover the relationship between emotion dysregulation and executive function. Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST) was used to evaluate executive function, and the emotion test was replaced with WCST. It show that: 1) ADD children got higher emotion dysregulation score compared to normal children. But their ability of emotion inhibition was not affected since dysregulation could be decreased when children were acquired to control emotion.2) ADD children revealed particularity in situations and demonstrated differences between positive and negative situations. The severity level of dysregulation was high in negative setting, while performances appeared better in positive one.3) ADD children did worse in cold executive function of inhibition and some part of hot executive function compared to normal children. In negative situation in study two, the severity of deficit of inhibition in ADD children with disinhibition was moderately associated with emotion dysregulation.