Longitudinal Temperament Pathways to ADHD Between Childhood and Adolescence

Extending the ADHD Phenotype and Parsing Heterogeneity Via Emotional Dysregulation and Personality: A Latent Profile Analysis in College Students

OBJECTIVE

Past work has provided support for the relevance of personality traits and emotional dysregulation (ED), individually, for characterizing ADHD phenotypes beyond symptoms in college-aged populations. Yet, no studies have attempted to integrate these constructs into current ADHD conceptualizations within the context of one another. The current study thus sought to determine whether personality traits and ED dimensions, together, could facilitate meaningful differentiation of college students meeting symptom and impairment criteria for ADHD.

METHOD

Participants included 1,858 college students aged 18 to 29 years (M = 19.4 years, 70.4% female) with either self-reported ADHD diagnoses and/or clinical levels of symptoms and impairment.

RESULTS

Latent profile analyses provided support for a three-profile solution comprised of a Primarily Inattentive/ED Present/Emotionally Unstable profile, a Moderate ADHD Severity/ED Absent/Normative Personality Traits profile, and a High ADHD Severity/ED Absent/Normative Personality Traits profile. Consideration of ED dimensions and personality traits, namely Emotional Stability, meaningfully enriched profiles beyond ADHD sum scores. Concurrent validation of profiles suggested significant differences with respect to impairment domains and internalizing problems.

CONCLUSION

Additional work is needed to characterize the integration of personality and ED into ADHD conceptualizations to inform more comprehensive assessment and treatment practices.

Reproducible structure with measurement invariance for the Parent-Report Early Adolescent Temperament Questionnaire: Findings from three independent samples

Differences in adolescent temperament are associated with innumerable psychological outcomes in the developmental literature and can help link adult personality-based nosology to earlier development. The Early Adolescent Temperament Questionnaire-Revised is one important measure of adolescent temperament designed to capture constructs within the influential Rothbart temperament model. Yet conflicting factor structures and minimal evidence for measurement invariance across samples and clinical groups have limited its ability to further temperament-based understanding of psychopathology. The goal of the present study was to identify reproducible measurement structures for the parent-rated and self-rated Early Adolescent Temperament Questionnaire-Revised in multiple large independent samples and to evaluate how that structure corresponded to their proposed theoretical structure. We also tested measurement invariance and compared temperament characteristics in youth with and without attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. Findings support the lower order theoretical structure using a reduced set of items in the parent-rated form, including evidence for measurement invariance across samples and clinical groups. Findings confirm important patterns of temperament variation associated with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder diagnosis, including lower effortful control and differences in expression of negative affect and surgency. The self-rated form demonstrated poor structural validity and could not be reliably replicated in a confirmatory sample. Parent-reported temperament may help link personality-based models of psychopathology to earlier developmental periods where psychopathology often emerges. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Momentary Dynamics Implicate Emotional Features in the ADHD Phenotype

Emotional dysregulation is increasingly recognized as important to the attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) phenotype alongside inattention and hyperactivity-impulsivity. Studies of ADHD have relied primarily on trait-based conceptualizations that emphasize stability of symptoms across moderate developmental timescales (i.e., months to years). Trait-based conceptualizations provide a critical view but fail to account for short-term dynamic variations in the expression of ADHD symptoms and emotion. This leaves a gap in our understanding of the short-term variation in ADHD symptom expression and the dynamic relationships among ADHD symptoms and emotion. Here, we assessed caregiver report of ADHD symptoms and positive and negative emotion using ecological momentary approaches over 2 weeks in a sample of 36 children with and without ADHD between the ages of 7-12 years old. Between-person (RKF) and within-person (RC) reliability were estimated. Multilevel models tested specific covariation hypotheses between ADHD symptoms and emotion. Analyses confirmed that ADHD and emotion ratings were reliable as individual differences (i.e., between-person; RKF range 0.93-1.0) and moment-to-moment change (i.e., within-person; Rc range 0.66-0.88) measures. Multilevel models found little evidence for lagged effects between domains, but consistently identified concurrent expression of ADHD symptoms and emotions; inattention covaried most strongly with negative emotion and hyperactivity-impulsivity covaried most strongly with positive emotion. Results demonstrate the importance of complementing trait-level conceptualizations with assessment of momentary dynamics. Momentary assessment suggests important covariation of ADHD symptoms and emotion as part of the ADHD phenotype.

The Oregon ADHD-1000: A new longitudinal data resource enriched for clinical cases and multiple levels of analysis

The fields of developmental psychopathology, developmental neuroscience, and behavioral genetics are increasingly moving toward a data sharing model to improve reproducibility, robustness, and generalizability of findings. This approach is particularly critical for understanding attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), which has unique public health importance given its early onset, high prevalence, individual variability, and causal association with co-occurring and later developing problems. A further priority concerns multi-disciplinary/multi-method datasets that can span different units of analysis. Here, we describe a public dataset using a case-control design for ADHD that includes: multi-method, multi-measure, multi-informant, multi-trait data, and multi-clinician evaluation and phenotyping. It spans > 12 years of annual follow-up with a lag longitudinal design allowing age-based analyses spanning age 7-19 + years with a full age range from 7 to 21. Measures span genetic and epigenetic (DNA methylation) array data; EEG, functional and structural MRI neuroimaging; and psychophysiological, psychosocial, clinical and functional outcomes data. The resource also benefits from an autism spectrum disorder add-on cohort and a cross sectional case-control ADHD cohort from a different geographical region for replication and generalizability. Datasets allowing for integration from genes to nervous system to behavior represent the "next generation" of researchable cohorts for ADHD and developmental psychopathology.

Individual differences in sensitivity to positive home environment among children "at risk" for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder: A review

Although the evidence for the genetic basis of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is strong, environmental factors, such as the quality of parenting or the home environment, may moderate such genetic liability. The plausible negative effect of a low-quality home environment and negative parenting on child outcomes is well-established; however, the positive effect of a high-quality environment and positive parenting remained largely uninvestigated. Due to the presence of genetic, temperamental, or physiological factors, children who were traditionally considered at-risk for ADHD may be more sensitive to aspects of their environment compared to children who are not at such risk. Therefore, they would be more affected by their environmental experience, either for good or bad. Under supportive environmental conditions, such at-risk individuals might actually outperform their non-vulnerable peers, suggesting that these individual factors might be considered susceptibility factors rather than risk factors. Little is known regarding the positive effect of the environment in the ADHD literature, but it has been demonstrated in cognitive functions that are closely associated with ADHD, such as executive functions (EF). We review this literature and examine the extant empirical support for sensitivity to aspects of the home environment and parenting in the case of ADHD and EF. Moreover, we review factors that could help identify the specific aspects of the home environment and parenting that these children might be more susceptible to. Such knowledge could be valuable when designing preventive interventions and identifying those children that are especially sensitive and could benefit from such interventions. Recommendations for future studies are discussed as well.