Comparing Studies of Risky Decision Making in ADHD and Conduct Disorder

Edmund Sonuga-Barke ¹ Lin Sorensen ^2,3

¹Developmental Psychology, Psychiatry and Neuroscience, King’s College London
²Department of Biological and Medical Psychology, University of Bergen
³K.G. Jebsen Centre for Research on Neuropsychiatric Disorders, Department of Biological and Medical Psychology, University of Bergen

There is an assumption that people with ADHD like taking risks and that risk taking is a specific and distinctive feature of the ADHD motivational profile. Recent experimental studies have cast doubt on this suggesting that risk taking in ADHD is simply a particular example of a more general tendency to sub-optimal decision making. Here we report on a number of recent experiments using different laboratory tasks that provide converging support for this latter conclusion.

Edmund Sonuga-Barke