Abstract
Objective
Individuals with ADHD are at a higher risk for internalizing disorders such as anxiety (APA, 2013). Some internalizing symptoms are associated with problems in shift (Ajilchi & Nejati, 2017). Individuals with ADHD also often have poor shift (Martel et al., 2007; Shuai et al., 2011). Hence, this project hypothesized shift to be a statistical mediator in the relationship between ADHD status and internalizing symptoms.
Method
Participants included 257 children from a pre-existing, grant-funded database (R03HD048752, R15HD065627), which is from a community sample. The mean age of participants is 9.54 years, with this sample being 53.7% male and 87.9% Caucasian. Participants included children with ADHD (n = 89), Reading Disorder (RD; n = 47), comorbid RD/ADHD (n = 47), and controls (n = 74). Parents completed several questionnaires on their child, including the Behavior Rating Inventory of Executive Function (BRIEF) and the Behavior Assessment System for Children-Second Edition (BASC-2). The BRIEF Shift and BASC-2 Internalizing Problems subscales were used for this project.
Results
Mediation analysis was run in PROCESS using ADHD status as the predictor variable, BRIEF Shift as the statistical mediator, and BASC Internalizing Problems as the outcome variable. ADHD status was no longer significant when including Shift in the model (from p = .01 to p = .59). Bootstrap estimation with 5,000 samples indicated a significant indirect effect, as the 95% confidence interval did not contain zero [2.66, 6.61].
Conclusions
Problems with shift may be a mediator contributing to the higher risk for internalizing problems in children with ADHD. However, this needs to be verified in a longitudinal study.