'Know thyself', a never -ending story: Interpersonal self -knowledge and life story coherence among adolescent girls with and without ADHD.

摘要

Using a prospective, longitudinal design, the study investigated a model of resilience in 209 girls with the childhood diagnosis of attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and non-diagnosed comparison girls (ages 6-13 at baseline and ages 11-18 at follow-up). Childhood ADHD was the principal risk factor with respect to outcomes of externalizing and internalizing problems and lower social competence in adolescence. Compensatory and protective effects of two conceptually-linked factors---interpersonal self-knowledge (ISK) and life story coherence---were examined. ISK was measured following a parent-adolescent interaction task, when participants completed parallel parent and adolescent questionnaires about the effects of daughter's behavior on mother's emotions during the task. Life story coherence was assessed from a multi-dimensional coding system applied to 5-minute life stories told by the girls. Additional analyses investigated whether the higher-order dimension of story coherence, global coherence (GC), but not ISK, was a protective factor for girls who experienced high family instability in childhood.;Childhood ADHD predicted elevated levels of internalizing and externalizing problems and diminished social competence in adolescence. Childhood family instability predicted higher adolescent externalizing problems, lower mother-reported friendship quality, and lower levels of prosocial behaviors. ISK predicted lower levels of problem behaviors and higher social competence outcomes in adolescence for the entire sample of girls. ISK did not interact with the risk factor, ADHD, with respect to any outcome variable, yet ISK appeared to be a stronger predictor than GC of mother-reported prosocial behavior for girls who were exposed to higher family instability in childhood. GC predicted to greater social competence on several outcome measures and interacted with the childhood diagnosis of ADHD in predicting lower levels of teacher-reported internalizing problems. Additionally, girls from unstable families but who were coherent in their life stories, were described by their teachers as low in externalizing and internalizing behaviors, and were described by their mothers as more socially competent. The study gave preliminary evidence that ISK functions as an asset for girls irrespective of the diagnosis and that life story coherence is associated with better adaptation in at-risk girls.