Child Personality Accounts for Oppositional Defiant Disorder Comorbidity Patterns

Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD) is a behavioral psychopathology of childhood, characterized by patterns of hostile, defiant, and antagonistic behaviors (American Psychiatric Association 2013). Historically, study of ODD has lagged behind research on other forms of child psychopathology, such as Conduct Disorder (CD). Recently, renewed interest in ODD as an independent construct has elucidated the disorder as a complex and heterogeneous construct (Burke 2012; Burke et al. 2010a; Stringaris and Goodman 2009) with severe consequences (Aebi et al. 2013). Specifically, ODD consists of both irritable and oppositional symptom domains, which correspond with broader distinctions between distress/negative affect (NA) and disinhibition, respectively. This literature is in line with the idea that ODD is highly comorbid with a wide variety of other disorders (Boylan et al. 2007; Burke and Loeber 2010; Lehto-Salo et al. 2009), and that early ODD predicts later emergence of multiple forms of psychopathology (Burke et al. 2005). This comorbidity pattern positions ODD as a form of early psychopathology with high importance, but also underscores the need for enhanced clarity of ODD as a diagnostic entity. The current study aimed to clarify ODD symptomatology by examining differential patterns of ODD comorbidity in the context of personality and gender. …