Reward processing and irritability in young adults

Abstract Despite increasing interest in the mechanisms of irritability, little research in this domain has been conducted with adults. The present study evaluates relationships among trait irritability, reward responsivity, and frustrative non-reward in a non-clinical sample of young adult females (n = 58) using a paradigm that has been used successfully in pediatric populations with clinically significant irritability. Similar to prior work in these pediatric populations, the frustration manipulation increased self-reported frustration and decreased task accuracy on trials requiring spatial attention shifts. Higher trait irritability was associated with smaller FRN amplitudes to loss feedback. Trait irritability was unrelated to the FRN to reward feedback and the reward positivity ERP. These findings provide preliminary evidence linking irritability with aberrant frustrative non-reward in a healthy young adult sample.