ArticleJournal of clinical child and adolescent psychology : the official journal for the Society of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology, American Psychological Association, Division 532016
Are Executive Functioning Deficits Concurrently and Predictively Associated with Depressive and Anxiety Symptoms in Adolescents?
Article in Journal of clinical child and adolescent psychology : the official journal for the Society of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology, American Psychological Association, Division 53, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 48 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
48 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 117 citations in OpenAlex.
- Executive Functions in Children and Adolescents with Turner Syndrome: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.Neuropsychology review · 2018Pooled it
- Executive Functioning, Diabetes Distress, and Diabetes Management Among Adolescents With Type 1 Diabetes: Youth and Parent Perspectives.Pediatric diabetes · 2025Trial
- WELCOME: improving WEight controL and CO-Morbidities in children with obesity via Executive function training: study protocol for a randomized controlled trial.BMC public health · 2018Trial
- Omega-3 supplementation associated with improved parent-rated executive function in youth with mood disorders: secondary analyses of the omega 3 and therapy (OATS) trials.Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines · 2018Trial
- Positive and negative maternal mental health demonstrate distinct pathways to childhood depression.Psychological medicine · 2026Article
- Cyber-victimized and cognitively fogged? Cyberbullying victimization and executive function.BMC public health · 2026Article
- Do executive functions moderate or mediate? exploring their role in the prospective association between psychopathic traits and conduct problems in children.Child and adolescent psychiatry and mental health · 2026Article
- Improved sleep quality is independently associated with decision-making recovery in panic disorder: a longitudinal study.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Differentiating adolescents with severe internalizing symptoms using a brief computerized cognitive task: a LASSO regression approach.BMC psychiatry · 2026Article
- Measurement of executive functioning in pre-school aged children in India: a scoping review.Current psychology (New Brunswick, N.J.) · 2026Article
- The longitudinal relation between adolescents' learning outcomes and internalizing symptoms: The role of ADHD symptoms.PloS one · 2026Article
- Relationship between anxiety and executive functioning among youth with Down syndrome.Research in developmental disabilities · 2025Article
- The Tower of London task in children and adolescents with neuropsychiatric disorders.Child neuropsychology : a journal on normal and abnormal development in childhood and adolescence · 2025Article
- Refining our Understanding of Anxiety in Autistic Youth: Examining the Role of Behavioral Inflexibility.Journal of autism and developmental disorders · 2024Article
- Childhood stress, gender, and cognitive control: Midline theta power.Journal of psychiatric research · 2024Article
- The Impact of Executive Dysfunction on Anxiety in Hearing-Impaired College Students: Smartphone Addiction as a Mediator and Academic Procrastination as a Moderator.Psychology research and behavior management · 2024Article
- Correlation research on physical activity and executive function in female college students with subclinical depression.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2024Article
- Reduced volume of the left cerebellar lobule VIIb and its increased connectivity within the cerebellum predict more general psychopathology one year later via worse cognitive flexibility in children.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2023Article
- How Self-Regulation and Executive Functions Deficits Affect Quality of Life of Children/Adolescents with Emotional Regulation Disorders.Children (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Investigating the Link Between Depression, Cognition, and Motivation in Late Childhood.Child psychiatry and human development · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
The central objective of the current study was to evaluate how executive functions (EF), and specifically cognitive flexibility, were concurrently and predictively associated with anxiety and depressive symptoms in adolescence. Adolescents (N = 220) and their parents participated in this longitudinal investigation. Adolescents' EF was assessed by the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST) during the initial assessment, and symptoms of depressive and anxiety disorders were reported by mothers and youths concurrently and 2 years later. Correlational analyses suggested that youths who made more total errors (TE), including both perseverative errors (PE) and nonperseverative errors (NPE), concurrently exhibited significantly more depressive symptoms. Adolescents who made more TE and those who made more NPE tended to have more anxiety symptoms 2 years later. Structural equation modeling analyses accounting for key explanatory variables (e.g., IQ, disruptive behavior disorders, and attention deficit hyperactive disorder) showed that TE was concurrently associated with parent reports of adolescent depressive symptoms. The results suggest internalizing psychopathology is associated with global (TE) and nonspecific (NPE) EF difficulties but not robustly associated with cognitive inflexibility (PE). Future research with the WCST should consider different sources of errors that are posited to reflect divergent underlying neural mechanisms, conferring differential vulnerability for emerging mental health problems.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.