Emotional and Nonemotional Conflict Processing in Pediatric and Adult XXXX .

@entity1 @entity148 @entity137
OBJECTIVE: Perturbations in emotional conflict adaptation, an implicit regulatory process, have been observed in adult @entity148 . However, findings remain inconsistent and restricted to adults. The current study compares conflict adaptation in youth and adults, with and without @entity148 . We predicted conflict adaptation would be present in the healthy but not the anxious groups. METHODS: In a clinic setting, 111 @entity1 (27 healthy youth, 22 anxious youth, 41 healthy adults, and 21 anxious adults) completed emotional and nonemotional conflict tasks. Groups did not differ (all p's >0.1) on intelligence quotient (IQ), gender, and socioeconomic status; age did not differ between healthy and anxious subjects in either age cohort. Separate four way mixed-design analyses of variance were conducted to test hypotheses regarding the influence of diagnosis, age group, and task type on accuracy (percent correct) and @entity137 ( @entity137 ) for conflict adaptation (incongruent trials preceded by incongruent vs. congruent trials) and conflict detection (incongruent vs. congruent trials). RESULTS: Measures of conflict adaptation did not interact with diagnosis or age. There was a significant main effect of conflict adaptation across the overall sample in the expected direction for accuracy, but not @entity137 . The well-replicated conflict detection effect also did emerge across tasks, with slower @entity137 and lower accuracy for incongruent than for congruent trials. These effects were greater for the emotional than for nonemotional tasks. Finally, there were age differences in accuracy-based conflict detection specific to the emotional task, for which the size of the effect was larger for youth than for adults. CONCLUSIONS: The current study of youth and adults did not replicate prior behavioral findings of failure to engage conflict adaptation in @entity148 . Therefore, more work is needed before widely adopting conflict adaptation paradigms as a standard neurocognitive marker for @entity148 .
