Final published version
Licence: CC BY: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
| <mark>Journal publication date</mark> | 31/12/2022 |
|---|---|
| <mark>Journal</mark> | Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry |
| Issue number | 12 |
| Volume | 63 |
| Number of pages | 8 |
| Pages (from-to) | 1583-1590 |
| Publication Status | Published |
| Early online date | 29/04/22 |
| <mark>Original language</mark> | English |
BACKGROUND: Previous research has suggested that children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) symptoms commonly show emotion dysregulation difficulties. These difficulties may partly explain the strong tendency for internalizing problems such as anxiety and depression to co-occur with ADHD symptoms. However, no study has yet provided a longitudinal analysis of the within-person links between ADHD symptoms, emotion dysregulation, and internalizing problems necessary to examine this hypothesis from a developmental perspective.
METHODS: We used data from the age 3, 5, and 7 waves of the large UK population-representative Millennium Cohort Study (n = 9,619, 4,885 males) and fit gender-stratified autoregressive latent trajectory models with structured residuals (ALT-SR) to disaggregate within- and between-person relations between ADHD symptom, emotion dysregulation, and internalizing problem symptoms.
RESULTS: We found that emotion dysregulation significantly mediated the longitudinal within-person association between ADHD symptoms and internalizing problems.
CONCLUSIONS: Results underline the promise of targeting emotion dysregulation as a means of preventing internalizing problems co-occurring with ADHD symptoms.