Cognitive Disengagement Syndrome Symptoms from Early Childhood to Adolescence in a Nationally Representative Spanish Sample

ABSTRACT

Objective

The identification of a common set of symptoms for assessing cognitive disengagement syndrome (CDS, formerly sluggish cognitive tempo) for early childhood (ages 5–8), middle childhood (ages 9–12), and adolescence (ages 13–16) is needed to advance research on the developmental psychopathology of CDS (i.e. a common symptom set with comparable internal and external validity for each age group).

Method

Parents of a nationally representative sample of 5,525 Spanish children and adolescents (ages 5 to 16, 56.1% boys) completed measures of CDS, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder-inattention (ADHD-IN), and other measures.

Results

First, the 15 CDS symptoms showed convergent and discriminant validity relative to the ADHD-IN symptoms within each age group. Second, CDS showed stronger first-order and unique associations than ADHD-IN with anxiety, depression, somatization, daytime sleep-related impairment, and nighttime sleep disturbance, whereas ADHD-IN showed stronger first-order and unique associations than CDS with ADHD-hyperactivity/impulsivity, oppositional defiant disorder, and academic impairment. Third, CDS showed stronger first-order and unique associations than ADHD-IN with a history of having an anxiety, depression, or bipolar disorder diagnosis, whereas ADHD-IN showed stronger first-order and unique associations with having an ADHD diagnosis.

Conclusions

The identification of a common set of CDS symptoms spanning early childhood to adolescence allows for the advancement of research on CDS, with a particular need now for longitudinal studies and examination of CDS with other functional outcomes and across other cultural contexts.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data Availability Statement

The study was not preregistered. The Mplus input and outputs files for all analyses are available from the first author. Data are available from the corresponding author upon a reasonable request and the execution of a data use agreement.

Ethical Approval

The research protocol was approved by the Research Ethics Committee (Institutional Review Board [IRB]) of the University of the Balearic Islands. The approval number was 246CER22.

Informed Consent

Parents provided written informed consent.

Supplementary Material

Supplemental material for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/15374416.2023.2272944

Notes

¹ All the correlational and regression analyses with the daytime sleep-impairment factor were repeated with the deletion of the CDS drowsy or sleepy during the day item to eliminate item overlap between the CDS and daytime sleep-impairment scales. There were no changes in the results with the deletion of this item.

² One of the two inconsistent results across the three age groups was that CDS did not have a stronger first-order and unique association than ADHD-IN with depression in the adolescent group, whereas the associations for CDS with depression were stronger in the two youngest groups. As noted by an anonymous reviewer, these results may point to different pathways that contribute to adolescent depression (i.e., a more consistent depressive pathway with CDS vs. depression secondary to academic and/or social impairments with ADHD-IN).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by a grant [PID2020-118309RB-I00] funded by [MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033] and by the European Union NextGenerationEU/PRTR.