Abstract
Previous work suggests that symptoms of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are associated with procrastination in college students, but relatively little is known about markers that account for this relation. In the present study, we examined the relation between ADHD symptoms and procrastination and whether indirect effects through emotion regulation and self-esteem independently and/or serially account for this relation. Five hundred ninety-five college students (79.5% female; 84.7% white; 94.3% between 18 and 22 years of age) completed a variety of online self-report measures assessing ADHD symptoms, emotion dysregulation, self-esteem, and procrastination. Difficulties in emotion regulation and self-esteem partially accounted for the relation between ADHD symptoms and procrastination individually in simple mediation models as well as together in a serial mediation model. These results are consistent with previous literature linking ADHD symptoms to greater difficulties in emotion regulation, lower self-esteem, and more frequent procrastination. This work suggests that improving emotion regulation skills and self-esteem in college students with symptoms of ADHD should be an important goal of treatment, but future work using longitudinal data is needed to gain a better understanding of the temporal relations among these variables.
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Notes
All reported pathway parameters are unstandardized coefficients.
When running all analyses with the ADHD symptom subscales instead of the total score, the pattern of results also remained the same.
When running all analyses separately by sex, most simple mediation models were not significant among males except the models examining indirect effects via self-esteem and lack of emotional clarity. Most of the serial mediation models were significant for males except for the serial pathway via nonacceptance of emotional responses. Note that these analyses are not included in the text due to lack of adequate power.
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Bodalski, E.A., Flory, K., Canu, W.H. et al. ADHD Symptoms and Procrastination in College Students: The Roles of Emotion Dysregulation and Self-Esteem. J Psychopathol Behav Assess 45, 48–57 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10862-022-09996-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10862-022-09996-2