Are We Measuring ADHD or Anxiety? Examining the Factor Structure and Discriminant Validity of the Adult ADHD Self-Report Scale in an Adult Anxiety Disorder Population
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Adults with clinical anxiety have significant symptom overlap and above average rates of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Despite this, ADHD remains a vastly under-detected disorder among this population, indicating the need for a screener with well-understood symptom dimensions and good discriminant validity. The current study compared competing models of ADHD as well as discriminant properties of self-reported ADHD symptoms as measured by the Adult ADHD Self-Report Scale (ASRS-v1.1) in 618 adults with clinical anxiety. A three-factor correlated model of Inattention, Impulsivity, and Hyperactivity, with the movement of one item, talks excessively, to a factor of Impulsivity from Hyperactivity fit better than the one-factor, two-factor, and traditional three-factor models of ADHD. Discriminant properties of the screener were fair to good against measures of clinical anxiety and distress; however, some items within the Hyperactivity factor (e.g., difficulty relaxing; feeling driven by a motor) loaded more strongly onto factors of clinical anxiety than ADHD when measures were pooled together. These results suggest that clinicians making differential diagnoses between adult ADHD and anxiety or related disorders should look for evidence of ADHD beyond the overlapping symptoms, particularly for those within the Hyperactivity factor.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".