Temperament and personality profile of youth with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder: a meta-analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to determine the temperament and personality profile of children and adolescents with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) through a systematic review and meta-analyses of published data. METHODS: We searched PubMed, PsycINFO, and Web of Science in October 2021 (the PubMed search was updated in September 2024) to identify case-control studies of children and adolescents (= 18 years of age) with and without ADHD that reported on temperament or personality. The association between temperament or personality domains and ADHD status was measured with standardized mean differences (SMD). Data across studies were pooled with inverse variance random-effects meta-analyses. Risk of bias was assessed with the Newcastle-Ottawa Scale. RESULTS: A total of 31 studies including 2,525 children and adolescents with ADHD and 3,039 controls were included. The meta-analyses demonstrated that children and adolescents with ADHD had higher negative affectivity (SMD = 0.79, 95%CI 0.56 to 1.03) and lower effortful control (Rothbart's construct) (SMD = -1.43, 95%CI -2.14 to -0.72), higher emotionality (SMD = 1.01, 95%CI 0.64 to 1.38) and higher activity (Buss & Plomin's construct)(SMD = 0.96, 95%CI 0.74 to 1.17), lower distractibility (SMD = -0.74, 95%CI -1.22 to -0.26) and lower adaptability (Thomas & Chess's construct)(SMD = -1.01, 95%CI -1.93 to -0.10), higher novelty seeking (SMD = 1.19, 95%CI 0.87 to 1.51) and lower persistence (Cloninger's construct)(SMD = -1.07, 95%CI -1.33 to -0.81), and higher neuroticism (SMD = 0.92, 95%CI 0.37 to 1.48), higher extraversion (SMD = 0.27, 95%CI -0.13 to 0.67), and lower conscientiousness (five-factor model)(SMD = -0.95, 95%CI -1.85 to -0.04). As limitations, few studies reported all temperament or personality subscales, raising concerns about selective reporting and bias, while the heterogeneity of instruments and case/control definitions further challenged data pooling and interpretation. Consequently, the meta-analyses yielded limited evidence. CONCLUSION: Children and adolescents with ADHD have greater negative affectivity/emotionality and lower effortful control/persistence/conscientiousness. However, these findings were based on relatively few studies, and there was considerable between-study variability. Future research should investigate whether temperament or personality have clinical implications for those with ADHD.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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) | 0.001 | 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".