Poster #17 - Poorer Inhibitory Control as a Transdiagnostic Predictor of Externalizing, Internalizing, and Thought-Disordered Problems in Children

• In Event: Poster Session 04

Abstract

Research has identified three dimensions that account for the majority of variance in psychopathology: internalizing, externalizing, and thought-disordered problems (Caspi et al., 2014). Internalizing problems consist of mood and anxiety problems; externalizing problems consist of acting-out behaviors such as aggression and hyperactivity; thought-disordered problems consist of difficulties related to mania, psychosis, and the autism spectrum. Despite suggestions that internalizing, externalizing, and thought-disordered problems may share common mechanisms, little work has identified transdiagnostic processes in their development.

Deficits in inhibitory control, the ability to suppress responses to irrelevant stimuli while pursuing a goal, may be a transdiagnostic process in the development of psychopathology. Difficulties inhibiting responses to less relevant stimuli may make it more likely that children over-allocate attention to ambiguous cues that they perceive as threatening. Thus, deficits in inhibitory control may lead children to experience greater anxiety in response to ambiguous cues (internalizing problems). In addition, children with inhibitory control deficits may be more likely to respond to perceived slights with aggression (externalizing problems). Further, children with poorer inhibitory control may struggle to inhibit habitual tendencies in order to reference reality, which is necessary for theory of mind, whose deficits are robustly linked to thought-disordered problems.

A key challenge to studying the development of psychopathology is that the dimensions of psychopathology show changes in behavioral manifestation across ages (i.e., heterotypic continuity). These challenges have prevented studies from examining the development of all three dimensions simultaneously across a lengthy developmental span.

The present study used different measures across ages to capture the changing behavioral expression of psychopathology from 3 to 7 years of age, and used developmental scaling to place scores from the different measures and raters on the same scale. This allowed charting children’s development of psychopathology in developmentally comparable ways, and to evaluate potential transdiagnostic predictors of the three dimensions of psychopathology.

Participants included a community sample of children (N=148) in an accelerated longitudinal study from 3 to 7 years of age. Psychopathology ratings were provided by mothers, fathers, and teachers/secondary caregivers. Internalizing, externalizing, and thought-disordered problems were rated by various measures from the Achenbach System of Empirically Based Assessment depending on the child’s age and the informant. Inhibitory control was assessed by an age-dependent battery of 13 performance-based measures and by informants’ ratings on the Behavior Rating Inventory of Executive Functioning and the Children’s Behavior Questionnaire.

We used Bayesian multidimensional item response theory models to perform developmental scaling of inhibitory control and psychopathology. Trajectories of inhibitory control and internalizing, externalizing, and thought-disordered problems are in Figure 1.

We examined structural equation models with inhibitory control as a predictor of the three dimensions of psychopathology. Model results are in Table 1. Inhibitory control was negatively associated with internalizing (β=–.30, p=.006), externalizing (β=–.22, p=.024), and thought-disordered problems (β=–.27, p=.005), with a medium effect size, even controlling for the child’s age, the child’s intelligence, and the family’s socioeconomic status.

Findings suggest that inhibitory control is a transdiagnostic predictor of internalizing, externalizing, and thought-disordered psychopathology in children.

Authors

• Isaac T. Petersen, University of Iowa
  Presenting Author

• Jacob J. Oleson, University of Iowa