The Role of Self-Regulation in the Development of Psychopathology during the Transition to Adolescence

• In Event: Leveraging Latent Growth Modeling To Understand Antecedents and Consequences of Self-Regulation from Early-Childhood to Adolescence

Abstract

Background: Psychopathology demonstrates marked changes within and between individuals across development, especially during the transition from childhood to adolescence. Evidence characterizing the directionality and rate of change across distinct dimensions of psychopathology has been mixed, with different studies indicating increases, decreases, or no change in internalizing and externalizing symptoms. Moreover, much remains unknown about the extent to which trajectories differ across individuals and what psychosocial factors contribute to these differences. Disruptions in self-regulation underlie many types of psychopathology and thus may be one factor that contributes to variability in symptom trajectories.
Methods: Using a large, diverse national sample of youth (9-10 years old at baseline) from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study® (n = 6,405) we tested trajectories of psychopathology over three years. At each time point, parents reported their child’s internalizing and externalizing symptoms. At baseline, youth completed computerized self-regulation tasks from the NIH Toolbox, including the Flanker Task and the Dimensional Change Card Sort Task, which measure inhibitory control and cognitive flexibility, respectively.
Results: We used growth mixture modeling to identify latent subgroups of youth with distinct psychopathology trajectories. Results indicated that there were four different internalizing trajectories: a high-stable group, a moderate-decreasing group, a moderate-increasing group, and a low-decreasing group (Figure 1a). For externalizing symptoms, there were three trajectories: a high-decreasing group, a moderate-increasing group, and a low-decreasing group (Figure 1b). We also used parallel process growth analysis to examine the co-development of internalizing and externalizing symptoms and identified five subgroups with distinct patterns of co-development (Figure 2). Next, inhibitory control and cognitive flexibility were added as predictors to evaluate whether levels of self-regulation were associated with distinct psychopathology trajectories. For internalizing symptomatology, there were no significant differences between the classes on inhibitory control or cognitive flexibility. For externalizing symptomatology, youth with higher inhibitory control were significantly more likely to be in the low-decreasing group relative to the high-decreasing group (b = .02, p = .01). Furthermore, youth with higher cognitive flexibility were more likely to be in the low-decreasing group than the moderate-increasing group (b = .02, p = .002). Finally, for joint symptom trajectories, the “moderate-increasing internalizing and externalizing” class had the lowest cognitive flexibility and the “moderate-decreasing internalizing/high-decreasing externalizing” class had the lowest inhibitory control.
Conclusion: These results indicate that different features of self-regulation are associated with different trajectories of mental health symptoms over time. Generally, stronger inhibitory control and cognitive flexibility were associated with lower and more stable symptom patterns, suggesting that early self-regulatory abilities may promote better mental health during the transition to adolescence.

Authors

• Alexis Brieant, Yale University
  Presenting Author

• Ka I Ip, Yale University

• Bailey Holt-Gosselin, Yale University

• Dylan Gee, Yale University