ADHD in Children
Visual Abstract
Self-Awareness of Executive Functioning Deficits in Adolescents With ADHD
Kayla A Steward , Alexander Tan , Lauren Delgaty , Mitzi M Gonzales , Melissa Bunner
Summarized by:
August 1, 2023
study source
J Atten Disord
Feb 2017
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What they studied
Do children with ADHD overestimate their abilities in executive function?
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What they found
Children with ADHD tend to overestimate their abilities to inhibit themselves, plan, organize, and monitor themselves.
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What this means
These results are consistent with other studies showing that those with ADHD overestimate their abilities.
Self-Awareness of Executive Functioning Deficits in Adolescents With ADHD
Objectives
Children with ADHD tend to underestimate their symptoms and overestimate their abilities in areas impacted by ADHD. They may overestimate their abilities at school and their abilities to make friends.
While ADHD is often first noticed at school, it can impact us in many ways outside of academics. Studies have shown that one of the core effects of ADHD is its effect on executive function, which covers the higher-level thought processes in your brain:
What is executive function?
Study Quote
Children with ADHD lack self-awareness of their social and academic deficits, frequently rating themselves more favorably than external sources. The purpose of the current study was to assess whether adolescents with ADHD also hold a positive bias toward their executive functioning (EF).
Methods
The study asked participants to rate their own executive function and compared their ratings with ratings from their parents. This allowed researchers to see how different a person's self-evaluation was compared to their parents' evaluations.
Study Quote
Participants include 22 control and 35 ADHD subjects, aged 11 to 16. Participants and their parents completed the Behavior Rating Inventory of Executive Functioning (BRIEF) Self and Parent forms, respectively. Discrepancy scores were calculated for each domain by subtracting the adolesce...
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Results
The results showed that individuals with ADHD tended to overestimate their abilities. The most significant effects were inhibition, planning and organization, working memory, and monitoring.
Study Quote
Discrepancy scores were significantly higher in the ADHD group than controls within the Inhibit, Shift, Monitor, Emotional Control, Working Memory, and Plan/Organization domains (all p < .05).
Conclusions
Based on these results, researchers concluded that those with ADHD tend to underestimate their symptoms and overestimate their abilities in executive function. This is similar to previous studies that have shown similar effects in social situations and academics.
Study Quote
As compared with controls, adolescents with ADHD tend to endorse fewer EF difficulties than what parents report. This is the first study to demonstrate that those with ADHD may overestimate their EF ability.