Explaining the relationship between temperament and symptoms of psychiatric disorders from preschool to middle childhood

Background: Four explanations for the concurrent and prospective associations between temperament and psychopathology in children have been suggested: predisposition, complication/scar, common cause/continuity, and pathoplasty/exacerbation. Because the confounding effects of common causes have not b...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Wichstrøm, Lars|||0000-0003-3199-4637, Penelo Werner, Eva|||0000-0001-6796-7660, Viddal, Kristine Rensvik, Osa, Nuria de la|||0000-0003-4499-0942, Ezpeleta, Lourdes|||0000-0002-8957-083X
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2018
País:España
Institución:Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Repositorio:Dipòsit Digital de Documents de la UAB
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:ddd.uab.cat:186530
Acceso en línea:https://ddd.uab.cat/record/186530
https://dx.doi.org/urn:doi:10.1111/jcpp.12772
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:ADHD
Anxiety
Conduct disorder
Complication
Continuity
Depression
Effortful control
Exacerbation
Fixed effects
Longitudinal
Negative affectivity
Oppositional defiant disorder
Pathoplasty
Predisposition
Prospective
Psychiatric symptoms
Random effects
Scar
Surgency
Temperament
Descripción
Sumario:Background: Four explanations for the concurrent and prospective associations between temperament and psychopathology in children have been suggested: predisposition, complication/scar, common cause/continuity, and pathoplasty/exacerbation. Because the confounding effects of common causes have not been ruled out in prior work, the support for the various explanations is uncertain. Methods: Screen-stratified community samples of 4-year olds in Trondheim, Norway (n = 1,042), and 3-year olds in Barcelona, Spain (n = 622), were assessed biennially for symptoms of attention-deficit/hyperactivity (ADHD), oppositional defiant (ODD), conduct (CD), anxiety, and depressive disorders through interviewer-based psychiatric interviews across four waves of data collection. The parents completed child temperament ratings. The data were analyzed with random and fixed effects regression adjusted for all time-invariant unmeasured confounders (e.g., genetics, common methods bias, item overlap). Results: In both Norway and Spain and across ages, negative affect predisposed children to symptoms of all disorders except CD, low effortful control predisposed children to ADHD and ODD-symptoms, and surgency predisposed children to increased ADHD-symptoms. Complication effects were observed in the Spanish children for ADHD-symptoms, which increased surgency and diminished effortful control, and for ODD-symptoms, which decreased surgency. The common cause and pathoplasty/exacerbation explanations were not supported. Conclusions: The present results are consistent with the view that temperament plays a causal role in the development of symptoms of psychiatric disorders in children. Because temperament is malleable, interventions targeting the affective, attentional, and behavioral regulatory components of temperament may reduce psychopathology in children.