Abstract
Impulsive behaviours occurring as a central deficit in connection with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are associated with social and academic impairment in children. Whereas impulsivity was shown to be related to both delay aversion and deficient timing skills, the mutual relation between the latter two has hardly been investigated. The present study therefore examined the interplay of delay aversion, timing skills, and impulsivity in a sample of eighty-eight children aged between seven and fourteen, twenty-one of them diagnosed with ADHD. Children participated in a delay aversion and a tapping task, while parents reported about their impulsiveness. The results showed that both delay aversion and deficient timing skills were related to impulsivity. Contrasting prior assumptions, delay aversion and timing skills were also shown to be related, even when controlling for impulsivity. Implications for interventions aiming to reduce children’s impulsivity as well as methodological considerations regarding whether to view ADHD as a category or a continuum are discussed.
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Notes
To measure delay aversion, participants were instructed to indicate answers to simple math tasks with a button press. The computer accepted the answer with varying delay. During the delay, the number of button presses and their mean duration was recorded. An index calculated as the product of the number of button presses and their duration indicated delay aversion.
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Acknowledgements
We thank all research assistants of this project for their work.
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This research was part of a larger project analysing correlates of decision-making in children with ADHD at the Center for Individual Development and Adaptive Education of Children at Risk (IDeA) in Frankfurt/Main, Germany, funded by the Hessian Initiative for the Development of Scientific and Economic Excellence (LOEWE). This research was furthermore funded by the LEAD Graduate School & Research Network [GSC1028], a project of the Excellence Initiative of the German federal and state governments.
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Appendix: Supplementary analyses
Appendix: Supplementary analyses
Interplay of delay aversion, timing skills and other ADHD symptoms
To test whether inattention and hyperactivity were related to delay aversion and timing skills, additional two-tailed partial correlation analyses were calculated. Controlling for age and ADHD diagnosis, the analyses showed that inattention and delay aversion were unrelated (r = .14, p = .23), while hyperactivity and delay aversion were related (r = .22, p = .049). Additionally, controlling for age and ADHD diagnosis, inattention and timing skills were unrelated (r = − .068, p = .55), while also hyperactivity and timing skills were (r = −.093, p = .42). Finally, delay aversion and timing skills were related when controlling for inattention, age, and ADHD diagnosis (r = − .23, p = .045), while they were not when controlling for hyperactivity, age, and ADHD diagnosis (r = − .21, p = .66).
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Blume, F., Kuehnhausen, J., Reinelt, T. et al. The interplay of delay aversion, timing skills, and impulsivity in children experiencing attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) symptoms. ADHD Atten Def Hyp Disord 11, 383–393 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12402-019-00298-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12402-019-00298-4