Inhibitory control of emotional interference in children with learning disorders: Evidence from event-related potentials and event-related spectral perturbation analysis

An impairment in interference inhibitory control ability has been reported in children with learning disorders (LD), but few studies have examined the neural mechanism of this impairment. This study applied electroencephalogram (EEG) technique to investigate the emotional interference inhibitory control ability in 25 LD children and 22 non-LD controls with face-word emotional Stroop task. Results from behavioral tasks showed that LD children exhibited lower accuracy and longer reaction times. The EEG analysis showed that the non-LD children displayed significant interference effects both in the ERP components, with N2, N450 and SP exhibiting a larger activation in incongruent condition than the congruent condition, and brain oscillation, with early and late alpha demonstrating a larger desynchronization in the incongruent condition compared to the congruent condition. However, all these interference effects were absent in the LD children except the SP component. The present findings seem to indicate that the deficit during emotional interference control ability among children with LD might be due to the impaired attention allocation ability during emotional conflict detection process. Future research is needed to replicate these results and to explore the biochemical mechanisms between the impaired emotional interference inhibitory control ability and impaired attentional control ability.