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Adult ADHD: Associations with Personality and Other Psychopathology

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Abstract

The goals of this study were to explicate adult ADHD’s relations with personality at both the domain and facet levels and to examine its associations with other psychological symptoms. Community members (N = 294) completed measures assessing ADHD inattentive and hyperactive/impulsive symptoms, five-factor model personality domains and facets, and other internalizing and externalizing symptoms. Inattentiveness showed strong negative relations with conscientiousness and extraversion and strong positive relations with neuroticism; in contrast, hyperactivity/impulsivity related negatively to agreeableness, positively to extraversion, and weakly to neuroticism. Whereas inattentiveness emerged as a positive predictor of internalizing psychopathology—and depression in particular—hyperactivity/impulsivity related weakly to internalizing but more strongly to externalizing psychopathology. Thus, inattentive and hyperactive/impulsive symptoms showed differential relations with personality—at both the domain and facet levels—and with other psychological symptoms. These results demonstrate the value in examining ADHD’s relations with personality facets and with a wide range of psychopathology within the same study.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by a grant from the University of Notre Dame Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts awarded to Kasey Stanton.

Conflict of Interest

Kasey Stanton and David Watson declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

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  1. Department of Psychology, University of Notre Dame, 118 Haggar Hall, Notre Dame, IN, 46556, USA

    Kasey Stanton & David Watson

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  1. Kasey Stanton
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Correspondence to Kasey Stanton.

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Stanton, K., Watson, D. Adult ADHD: Associations with Personality and Other Psychopathology. J Psychopathol Behav Assess 38, 195–208 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10862-015-9519-5

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