The Effect Of Reward And Punishment On Affective Decision-making On Two Subtypes Of Children With Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)

Using a variety of experimental tasks, the present study examined the effect of reward and punishment on affective decision-making on two subtypes of children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and normal controls. The data allowed us to explore the underlying mechanisms of affective decision-making and their deficits in children with ADHD.This study includes three experiments. Experiments 1 investigated ADHD and normal controls using the Children's Gambling Task (Kerr & Zelazo,2004),and recorded anticipatory Skin conductance recordings (SCRs) .The results showed that ADHD children were impaired in affective decision-making compared with normal controls, indicating that unusual sensitivity to reward in ADHD affect the ability of decision-making .On the other hand, the results also showed that ADHD generated lower anticipatory SCRs during the later part of task than normal controls, especially significant before choice from disadvantage card. These findings from ADHD infer that the same mechanism exists between ADHD and OFC patients in decision-making.Experiments 2 investigated ADHD and normal controls using a variant version of the gambling task, in which we reversed the order of reward and punishment .The results showed both ADHD children and normal controls chose more from advantage cards than disadvantage ones, no significant difference was found between the two subtype of ADHD, showing that the deficits in decision-making in ADHD probably resulted from over sensitivity to reward, not insensitivity to future consequences.Experiments 3 tested ADHD and normal controls using risking task with less emphasis on strategy and working memory than gambling task .The result showed that ADHD tend to select risky choices with high reward than normal controls.In general, these findings suggested that the deficit in decision-making in ADHD is mainly due to their over sensitivity to reward, which is also an powerful evidence of behavioral treatment to ADHD.