Stimulant medications for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) improve memory of emotional stimuli in ADHD-diagnosed college students.

OBJECTIVE Stimulant medications do not improve the academic achievement of ADHD diagnosed undergraduates. One reason may be that stimulant-induced sympathetic arousal might impair memory. PARTICIPANTS AND METHODS To test this hypothesis, we conducted a study between September 2011 and March 2012, to compare medicated (n=12) and non-medicated (n=11) ADHD diagnosed undergraduates, with non-ADHD students (n=12). All participants were presented with an audiovisual narrative that included an emotional segment, and answered questions about the story one week later. RESULTS All groups remembered the emotional segment significantly better than the neutral segments. Non-medicated ADHD students recalled less of both segments than the medicated ADHD or non-ADHD groups, which did not differ from each other. CONCLUSION Stimulants improved memory in ADHD students, and did not impair the relative retention of emotional, as opposed to neutral information. Stimulant-induced arousal cannot explain the academic deficit of ADHD undergraduates.