Illustrating a developmental pathology of self-regulation: The case of ADHD.

Beyond the continuum of individual differences in self-regulation capacities, or maybe at the edge of it (E. Taylor, 1999), one can find children who are suffering from a diverse range of developmental disorders that involve impairments of self-regulation. This chapter illustrates the consequences of failure in self-regulation by focusing on one such developmental pathology, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Current views of this syndrome conceptualize it primarily as a disorder in key aspects in the development of self-regulation (Nigg, 2005). First, I provide a brief general introduction to this syndrome. Then, each of the issues that have been covered in the previous chapters of this book is illustrated in the case of ADHD. In this sense, I treat this syndrome as an extreme case for looking at the causes and consequences of disregulation. Moreover, I look at the underlying brain mechanisms that are considered to be deficient in the syndrome, including brain anatomy, brain functioning, neurodevelopment, and genetics. In addition to reviewing relevant research literature about this syndrome, many of the sections of this chapter present findings from the longitudinal study on children at familial risk for ADHD that my colleagues and I have conducted for the past 8 years; therefore, it is worth offering a few words of introduction about this study. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved)