ADHD Symptom Severity and Subtypes as Predictors of Motivation Intervention Outcomes

Event: Undergraduate Research Symposium
Date: May 18, 2019
Location: UCI Student Center

Presenter: Yuya Xu, Francesca E. Trane, Nina Ozbardakci, Priti Shah
Mentor: Susanne Jaeggi, Masha R. Jones, Martin Buschkuehl

Title: ADHD Symptom Severity and Subtypes as Predictors of Motivation Intervention Outcomes

Abstract

​This research project studies whether the ADHD subtype can predict the effectiveness of a motivational intervention for children with ADHD. The participants included parents and the 59 children aged 7–14 (mean age = 10.13 years, female = 28.8%) officially diagnosed with ADHD. Children’s ADHD diagnoses were determined by the parent report (ADHD C = 21, ADHD IA = 22, ADHD subtype not specified = 16). Children participated in four small group motivational lessons where they were taught about growth mindset, neuroplasticity, coping strategies targeting frustration, and the potential of unique creative abilities of the individuals with ADHD. These lessons served to improve the children’s beliefs about the malleability of the intelligence, personal self-efficacy and their emotional control abilities. At pre and post assessments, children completed two challenging tasks to evaluate their persistence—a puzzle-building activity and a trivia questionnaire. Here we investigate whether children with ADHD combined type and children with ADHD predominantly inattentive type differed in their persistence from pre to post assessments. Analysis revealed no significant differences in persistence improvement between the ADHD-C and ADHD-IA groups on the puzzle task (p=.175) and the trivia task (p=.855), which suggests that ADHD subtype may not be a meaningful predictor of the effectiveness of motivational intervention. However, future analyses will account for missing data by using parents’ reports on the BRIEF2 and Conners Parents Rating Scales which can be used to distinguish whether a child’s symptoms are indicative of ADHD-C or ADHD-IA. Understanding whether ADHD subtype is predictor of intervention effectiveness will allow us to determine for whom the motivational intervention is most effective.

Yuya Xu at UCI's 2019 UROP Research Symposium