Dov Wallack | 2026 I.S. Symposium
Name: Dov Wallack
Title: Have You Tried Yoga?: The Wellness Effects of a Yoga Intervention on Young Adults with ADHD
Major: Neuroscience
Advisor: Grit Herzmann
Yoga鈥檚 use in wellness interventions for ADHD treatment continues to grow alongside research exploring its physical and cognitive health benefits. These benefits have been proposed to impact prevalent features of adult ADHD such as emotional dysregulation, but studies designed to causally evaluate the yoga component of an intervention are limited, especially in an undergraduate population. This study therefore sought to investigate the psychological wellness benefits of yoga as a practice on young adults with ADHD. Undergraduates with ADHD completed eight weeks of either a yoga (n = 15) or movement (n = 13) intervention of comparable aerobic exercise. Prior to and following the intervention, participants completed questionnaire measures of ADHD symptom severity, health related quality of life, and subjective stress; valence rating behavioral data was also collected from an emotional regulation task using IAPS images. General ADHD symptom severity decreased significantly from baseline following the intervention. However, contrary to initial hypotheses, equal improvement was observed between groups; furthermore, significant decrease of core domain ADHD symptoms was only found in the movement group. Subjective stress, quality of life, and emotional regulation were not found to significantly change following the intervention. These findings suggest that, for a population of young adult undergraduate students with ADHD, two months of yoga provides no further benefit towards ADHD symptoms than similar exercise-based behavioral interventions. Our results support a view of yoga-based and related behavioral interventions as secondary or auxiliary treatments due to their small effect sizes and mechanisms of complex interactions across lifestyle factors.
Posted in Symposium 2026 on May 1, 2026.
