William E Pelham

• Florida International University

Objective: To assess if recent increases in cannabis use among U.S. adults have occurred among parents living with children <18Study design: We analyzed 2012-2023 data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), an annual representative survey of U.S. residents aged ≥12. We estimated the prevalence of cannabis use outcomes in parents v...

This paper examines the reciprocal associations between specific internalizing and externalizing disorder symptoms and cannabis use during early adolescence with age and sex differences. We analyzed youth-reported cannabis use, depressive, anxiety, Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), Conduct Disorder (CD), and Oppositional Defiant Diso...

Objective Childhood complex trauma (CCT) prevalence among individuals with comorbid posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and substance use disorder (SUD) is unknown. We conducted a meta‐analysis to compare CCT prevalence in samples of PTSD alone, SUD alone and comorbid PTSD+SUD. Method A systematic review of PTSD, CCT and SUD literature was conduc...

From the 1950s–1990s, parental monitoring was conceptualized and studied as a “socializing mechanism,” driving changes in youth adjustment via several channels. In the past 2 decades, parental monitoring has become re‐conceptualized in many papers as simply one of several ways to obtain parental knowledge, with knowledge replacing monitoring as the...

Parental rules have been curiously neglected from a conceptual and measurement perspective. The first half of this paper reviews the literature to show that there is no commonly used, standardized measure of rules. Rules are typically measured either with unvalidated ad hoc standalone items or incidentally measured with 1-2 items on multi-item scal...

Parental monitoring and knowledge of their teens’ activities might enable parents to keep teens safe, reducing the risk of potentially traumatic events. This paper investigated that possibility using a large, nationwide sample of 11,880 early adolescent teens followed longitudinally from ages 10–11 to 13–14 years old. At annual assessments, teens c...

Many parents in the U.S. have begun using GPS-based digital location tracking (DLT) technologies (smartphones, tags, wearables) to track the whereabouts of children and adolescents. This paper lays the foundation for an emerging science of DLT by performing the first theoretical analysis and review of empirical literature on DLT. First, we develop...

Introduction: Chronic use of nicotine and tobacco products (NTP) continues to be a leading cause of morbidity and mortality. Uptake is most common among youth and young adults but knowledge about effective prevention and intervention approaches is insufficient. The goal of the present study was to examine the impact of social cognitive factors on...

Potentially traumatic events (PTEs) and substance use (SU) are commonly endorsed in early adolescence, a crucial period for neurodevelopment. Separately, they have been shown to alter within- and between-network connectivity in the three brain networks posited by Menon’s Theory of Psychopathology: the default mode network (DMN), fronto-parietal net...

Parental monitoring is a construct of longstanding interest in multiple fields—but what is it? This paper makes two contributions to the ongoing debate. First, we review how the published literature has defined and operationalized parental monitoring. We show that the monitoring construct has often been defined in an indirect and nonspecific fashio...

Background. Cannabis is one of the most widely used drugs in early adolescence, a crucial time for development. Cannabinoids within the cannabis plant (e.g., delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol [THC], and cannabidiol [CBD]) are suggested to have a range of health implications. These may differ by sex, given sex differences in the endocannabinoid system (E...

There is a positive association between heightened activity levels and improved working memory performance (WM) in individuals with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Recent research suggests that stimulant medications may have a simultaneous positive impact on WM and motor skills. Yet, it is unclear the specific connection between mo...

Demographic data from nearly 50 years of treatment research for children and adolescents with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are synthesized. Comprehensive search identified ADHD treatment studies that were between-group designs, included a psychosocial, evidence-based treatment, and were conducted in the United States. One hundred...

Objective: Underreporting of adolescent substance use is a known issue, with format of assessment (in-person vs. remote) a potentially important factor. We investigate whether being assessed remotely (via phone or videoconference) versus in-person affects youth report of substance use patterns, attitudes, and access, hypothesizing remote visits wou...

Parental monitoring and knowledge of their teens’ activities might enable parents to keep teens safe, reducing the risk of potentially traumatic events. This paper investigated that possibility using a large, nationwide sample of 11,880 teens followed longitudinally from ages 10-11 to 13-14 years old. At annual assessments, teens completed measures...

Objective: The literature linking more caregiver warmth to better youth adjustment is almost entirely non-experimental, leaving estimates vulnerable to confounding bias. We evaluated the extent and potential impact of confounding in these non-experimental designs.Method: Reviewing the literature, we identified potential confounders of the link betw...

Background Why do potentially traumatic events (PTEs) and substance use (SU) so commonly co‐occur during adolescence? Causal hypotheses developed from the study of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and substance use disorder (SUD) among adults have not yet been subject to rigorous theoretical analysis or empirical tests among adolescents with th...

Low parental monitoring is a well-established risk factor for and presumed cause of teen problem behavior. However, an integrated theory for how monitoring changes teen behavior has not been articulated. We propose a model in which parental monitoring can reduce teen misbehavior via nine mechanisms organized into behavior-management (B), context-co...

William ("Bill") E. Pelham Jr. was a renowned clinical child psychologist who specialized in the assessment and treatment of children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Bill was born in 1948 in Atlanta, Georgia, to William E. Pelham Sr. and Kittie Copeland Kay, the eldest of four brothers. Bill is most well-known for the developm...

From the 1950s to 1990s, parental monitoring was conceptualized and studied as an independent construct, driving changes in youth adjustment. In the past two decades, parental monitoring has instead come to be conceptualized in many papers as simply a way to acquire parental knowledge, with knowledge in turn driving changes in youth adjustment. We...

Objective: Parent history of alcohol-related problems and antisocial behaviors contribute to adolescent alcohol use and are associated with offspring attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Youth with ADHD may be susceptible to intergenerational transmission of alcohol-related cognitions, which may model drinking motives that enhance risk...

Introduction Consumption of fast food has been linked to psychiatric distress, violent behaviors, and impulsivity in adolescents. The relationship between eating fast food, anger, and impulsivity has not been widely investigated. The National Consortium on Alcohol and Neurodevelopment in Adolescence community-based cohort consists of 831 youth, hal...

Background. Prior findings highly implicate childhood adversity (CA) as a risk factor for the emergence of comorbid posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and substance use disorder (SUD). However, a general estimated CA prevalence among individuals with comorbid PTSD+SUD is unknown, limiting the extent to which the field should consider the impact o...

Objective: To test two non-exclusive mechanisms by which parental monitoring might reduce teen substance use. The first mechanism is that monitoring increases punishment for substance use, since parents who monitor more are more likely to find out when substance use occurs (M1). The second mechanism is that monitoring directly prevents/averts teen...

What we know about parental monitoring today comes almost entirely from non-experimental studies linking parental monitoring to youth problem behavior. However, non-experimental designs produce accurate findings only when there is no confounding of the association between monitoring and the outcome of interest. Using data on 11,880 youth ages 9-15...

Parental monitoring is a construct of longstanding interest in multiple fields—but what is it? In the first part of this paper, we review how the published literature has defined and operationalized parental monitoring. We analyze the theoretical definitions offered in 26 seminal articles and the conceptual content of 281 items from rating scales u...

The quality of parent–child interaction is critical for child cognitive development. The Dyadic Parent–Child Interaction Coding System (DPICS) is commonly used to assess parent and child behaviors. However, manual annotation of DPICS codes by parent–child interaction therapists is a time-consuming task. To assist therapists in the coding task, rese...

In the past 10 years, an estimated 50% of parents in the U.S. have begun using GPS-based digital location tracking (DLT) technologies (smartphones, tags, wearables) to track the whereabouts of children and adolescents. However, we are aware of no prior overview of this topic and the associated literature. In this article, we (1) describe and compar...

Background. Why do potentially traumatic events (PTEs) and substance use (SU) so commonly co-occur during adolescence? Causal hypotheses developed from the study of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and substance use disorder (SUD) among adults have not yet been subject to rigorous theoretical analysis or empirical tests among adolescents with t...

Behavioral treatment, stimulants, and their combination are the recommended treatments for childhood attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The current study utilizes within-subjects manipulations of multiple doses of methylphenidate (placebo, 0.15, 0.30, and 0.60 mg/kg/dose t.i.d.) and intensities of behavioral modification (no, low, and...

The goal of this paper was to examine the role that language-related cognitive capacities (LRCC) might play in explaining adjustment of 7 to 12 year-old children (Mage = 9.24; SDage = 0.91) with and without ADHD. The sample was comprised of 178 children with ADHD and 86 typically-developing children (77.3% male; 81.4% White; 9.5% Black; 1.9% Hispan...

Purpose: Evaluate changes in early adolescent substance use from May 2020 to May 2021 during the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic using data from a prospective nationwide cohort: the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study. Methods: In 2018-2019, 9,270 youth aged 11.5-13.0 completed a prepandemic assessment of past-month alcohol and drug u...

Cannabis use and occurrences of depression during adolescence are common. However, the temporal relationship between the two is less understood. Does depression lead to cannabis use, or does cannabis use lead to depression, or is it a combination of both? Furthermore, this directionality is confounded by other substance use, specifically binge drin...

Objective: During the COVID-19 pandemic, adolescents and families have turned to online activities and social platforms more than ever to maintain well-being, connect remotely with friends and family, and online schooling. However, excessive screen use can have negative effects on health (e.g., sleep). This study examined changes in sleep habits an...

Background: Accurate drug use identification through subjective self-report and toxicological biosample (hair) analysis are necessary to determine substance use sequelae in youth. Yet consistency between self-reported substance use and robust, toxicological analysis in a large sample of youth is understudied. Objectives: We aim to assess concordanc...

Objective: Many studies have shown that parental knowledge/monitoring is correlated with adolescent substance use, but the association may be confounded by the many preexisting differences between families with low versus high monitoring. We attempted to produce more rigorous evidence for a causal relation using a longitudinal design that took adva...

Background Though largely substance-naïve at enrollment, a proportion of the youth in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study are expected to initiate substance use (SU) as they transition into later adolescence. With annual data from youth 9-13 years-old, this study aims to describe their SU patterns over time. Here, prevalence rat...

Our study characterized associations between three indicators of COVID-19's community-level impact in 20 geographically diverse metropolitan regions and how worried youth and their caregivers in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development℠ Study have been about COVID-19. County-level COVID-19 case/death rates and monthly unemployment rates were geoc...

Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a chronic neurodevelopmental disorder defined by pervasive symptoms of inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity. Furthermore, children with ADHD show marked deficits in executive functioning (EF) such as attention, effortful control, and behavior, and are more likely to have poor self-regulatory...

During the COVID‐19 pandemic, families have experienced unprecedented financial and social disruptions. We studied the impact of preexisting psychosocial factors and pandemic‐related financial and social disruptions in relation to family well‐being among N = 4091 adolescents and parents during early summer 2020, participating in the Adolescent Brai...

Childhood attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is associated with substantial burden to caregiver quality of life (QoL). However, a paucity of work has focused on quantifying QoL among caregivers of adolescents with a history of ADHD. The purpose of the current study was (1) to quantify maternal QoL in a sample of mothers of adolescents...

We examined developmental trajectories of attention‐deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) symptoms, standardized achievement, and school performance for adolescents with and without ADHD who did and did not enroll in postsecondary education (PSE; N = 749; 79% boys; 63% White, 17% non‐Hispanic Black, 10% Hispanic, and 10% other ethnicities). In a mu...

The current study aims to evaluate the effectiveness of a high-intensity (HI) versus a low-intensity (LI) skills-based summer intervention delivered to adolescents with ADHD by school staff in improving depressive symptoms, anxiety symptoms, social problems, and self-esteem. Participants were 325 ethnically diverse rising sixth and ninth graders wi...

Objective: Evaluate whether stimulant medication improves acquisition of academic material in children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) receiving small-group, content-area instruction in a classroom setting. Method: Participants were 173 children between the ages of 7 and 12 years old (77% male, 86% Hispanic) who met Diagnost...

Children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) receive supports and services in general and special education classrooms in schools. The present study aimed to report the contents of individualized education programs (IEPs) for children with ADHD and to compare the behavior of children with ADHD who had IEPs versus those with ADHD wh...

The conceptual overlap between mind-wandering and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)-related impairments is considerable, yet little experimental research examining this overlap among children is available. The current study aims to experimentally manipulate mind-wandering among children with and without ADHD and examine effects on tas...

Objective This study examined the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on drinking and nicotine use through June of 2021 in community sample of young adults. Method Data were from 348 individuals (49% female) enrolled in a long-term longitudinal study with an accelerated longitudinal design: the National Consortium on Alcohol and Neurodevelopment in Ad...

Objective To test whether smoking-specific risk factors in early adulthood mediate prediction to daily smoking from childhood ADHD. Methods Participants were 237 with and 164 without childhood ADHD. A smoking risk profile score comprising smoking-specific factors measured between ages 18 to 25 (e.g., craving severity) and age of initiation was tes...

The Loeber Risk Score (LRS) was developed to predict early-onset cannabis use in adolescence from late childhood, facilitating early identification. However, the LRS was developed in non-representative historical samples, leaving uncertain its generalizability to children/adolescents across the U.S. today. We externally validated the LRS in a diver...

Objective The General Life Functioning Scale (GLF) was developed to provide a complementary alternative to existing measures of impairment. We examined the psychometric properties of the GLF‐Parent version (GLF‐P), given the known value of informant ratings. Methods The GLF‐P was administered to parents of adults with attention‐deficit/hyperactivi...

It remains unclear if previously reported structural abnormalities in children with ADHD are present in adulthood regardless of clinical outcome. In this study, we examined the extent to which focal—rather than diffuse—abnormalities in fiber collinearity of 18 major white matter tracts could distinguish 126 adults with rigorously diagnosed childhoo...

Objective: To identify predictors of changes in height, weight, and BMI in children with ADHD starting Central Nervous System (CNS) stimulants. Study design: 230 medication-naïve children ages 5-12 with ADHD participated in a randomized trial evaluating the impact of CNS stimulants on growth over 30 months. This observational analysis focused on...

There is nationwide concern that the abrupt transition to remote instruction in response to the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic will have detrimental impacts on student learning. As a uniquely vulnerable group within schools, students with disabilities like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) may be at enhanced risk for these ne...

This study compares the efficacy and tolerability of central nervous system (CNS) stimulants in children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) with and without prominent irritability (IRR) over the course of 30 months. This is a secondary analysis of a study examining growth patterns in medication naïve children with ADHD subsequentl...

Background Although individuals with histories of childhood attention‐deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) report more alcohol‐related problems in adulthood than those without ADHD, it is unknown whether there are group differences in certain types of alcohol problems. We tested whether the nature of alcohol problems differed for individuals with...

Interventions for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) include positive behavior supports (e.g., parent training, school-based contingency management, behavioral peer interventions), training interventions (e.g., organizational skills training, social skills training, etc.), and other interventions (e.g., academic accommodations/modifica...

In an effort to understand teachers' perceptions of best practices for treatment of students with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and how those may have shifted over the past 20 years, general education elementary school teachers completed surveys regarding their opinions of evidence-based interventions in the classroom. Two indepen...

Engaging male caregivers within school settings is a major need within the educational field. Paternal engagement may be particularly important for children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Children with ADHD have increased risk for a number of poor educational outcomes, which may be attenuated by the benefits of positive male...

Objective: To examine recurrence and timing of maternal depression as predictors of depressive and conduct symptoms in children with and without ADHD. Method: Children aged 4 to 6 years (125 ADHD, 122 comparison) were followed over 8 years. Maternal depression was assessed annually. Youth depressive and conduct symptoms were assessed at ages 12 to...

The relation between sustained attention in the laboratory and behaviors exhibited in naturalistic settings among children with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) remains unclear. Additionally, research on stimulant medication effects in these areas and their association with one another remains scarce. Twenty-one children with ADHD an...

Variability in working memory (WM) task selection likely contributes to heterogeneity in effect size estimates of deficiencies in youth with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). This has resulted in the development of brief, easy to administer assessments such as the NIH List Sorting Working Memory (LSWM) task from the NIH Cognitive Too...

Individuals with Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) consistently exhibit a stronger preference for immediate rewards than for larger rewards available following a delay on tasks measuring choice impulsivity (CI). Despite this, however, there remains a dearth of studies examining the impact of stimulant treatment on CI as well as associ...

Objective Despite an emergence of psychosocial treatments for adolescent ADHD, their long-term effects are unknown. Method We examine four-year outcomes of a randomized controlled trial (N = 218) comparing high-intensity (HI; 412 h, $4,373 per participant) versus low-intensity (LI; 24 h, $97 per participant) skills-based summer intervention delive...

Background ADHD poses risk for problematic alcohol use through adulthood. Perceived peer alcohol use, one of the strongest correlates of individuals’ own alcohol use, is especially salient for adolescents with ADHD. The extent to which this risk extends into young adulthood is unknown, as well as how change in these constructs is associated through...

Interest in symptoms of sluggish cognitive tempo (SCT) has led to a number of studies evaluating how these symptoms respond to treatment commonly utilized in youths with symptoms of ADHD. No study to date, however, has examined the extent to which symptoms of SCT predict behavioral treatment response in youths across multiple domains of functioning...

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Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is the most prevalent neurodevelopmental disorder in children, with genetic factors accounting for 75–80% of the phenotypic variance. Recent studies have suggested that ADHD patients might present with atypical central myelination that can persist into adulthood. Given the essential role of sphingolip...

The literature is inconsistent regarding whether childhood ADHD confers risk for adulthood problematic alcohol use, depressive symptoms, and their co-occurrence. These inconsistencies could be due to meaningful heterogeneity in the adulthood outcomes of children with ADHD that were obscured in traditional group-based analyses. The current study tes...

Objective: Test the hypothesis that alcoholism, including antisocial alcoholism, is more prevalent among mothers and fathers of children with versus without ADHD. Method: Mothers (312 ADHD group, 235 non-ADHD group) and fathers (291 ADHD group, 227 non-ADHD group) in the Pittsburgh ADHD Longitudinal Study were interviewed along with their adolescen...

Two primary methods of quantifying executive functioning include self-or other-reports (i.e., questionnaire-based EF) and cognitive test performance (i.e., task-based EF). Despite their lack of concordance with one another and relatively inconsistent associations with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) symptoms, both approaches have be...

Background Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) symptoms persist into adulthood and are associated with functional impairments. Neuroimaging studies of reward-modulated inhibitory control can identify potential objective markers of impairment and may deepen our understanding of why probands engage in costly behaviors leading to adverse o...

Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder is associated with impaired cognitive functioning and increased delay discounting (i.e., a stronger preference for immediate reward). At the group level, stimulant medication improves cognition and delay discounting, yet not all children exhibit problems in these domains, and previous work has not examined w...

The present study examined the impact of parental knowledge and attitudes about attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and parental perceptions of treatment response on the utilization of behavioral and pharmacological ADHD treatments, using data from a longitudinal treatment study designed to assess physical growth in children with ADHD....

Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is the most common childhood neurodevelopmental disorder and is associated with an array of coexisting conditions that complicate diagnostic assessment and treatment. ADHD and its coexisting conditions may impact function across multiple settings (home, school, peers, community), placing the affected...

Decades of research support 3 interventions for youth with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD): behavioral intervention, stimulant medication, and their combination. However, professional organizations have long disagreed regarding the best approach for implementing evidence-based interventions for ADHD in practice. The accompanying Soc...

Objective: To inform the scope of future systematic reviews, meta-analyses, and treatment outcome studies, this review aims to describe the extent of the evidence for psychosocial interventions for children and adolescents with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, with particular attention to specific types of interventions, targets of outcom...

Objective: Characterize the early trajectories of financial functioning in adults with history of childhood ADHD and use these trajectories to project earnings and savings over the lifetime. Method: Data were drawn from a prospective case-control study (PALS) following participants with a rigorous diagnosis of ADHD during childhood (N = 364) and...

The lifetime maternal caregiver strain (CS) associated with raising a child with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) into adolescence and young adulthood was examined in the Pittsburgh ADHD Longitudinal Study (PALS), a longitudinal study of individuals diagnosed with ADHD in childhood and recontacted in adolescence and young adulthood f...

Little research has examined how children with conduct problems and concurrent callous-unemotional traits (CPCU) emotionally and behaviorally respond to time-out. This pilot study examined the distribution and stability of emotions during time-out as well as the association between emotions and negative behaviors. Participants were 11 children (Mag...

Applying the affective dimension of psychopathy to youth has advanced understanding of conduct problems in youth, leading to suggestions that other aspects of psychopathy may do the same. This was addressed in the present study by examining the structure and validity of psychopathic traits in elementary-age children as rated by mothers and teachers...

Little research has examined how children with conduct problems (CP) and concurrent callous-unemotional (CU) traits (CPCU) emotionally and behaviorally respond to time out (TO). This pilot study examined the distribution and stability of emotions during TO, as well as the association between emotions and negative behaviors. Participants were 11 chi...

Current evidence-based, school-based interventions for children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) include academic intervention, behavioral classroom management, and psychopharmacological intervention. However, some approaches that are commonly used have not been studied in controlled evaluations. The current study is the first r...

Objective: The study examined factors associated with uptake of behavioral therapy among children with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Methods: Insurance claims data from 2008-2014 (MarketScan) were reviewed to examine associations between behavioral therapy use and demographic, patient, family, and provider factors. The associa...

Research suggests that children with conduct problems (CP) and callous-unemotional (CU) traits show a diminished response to behavior therapy, perhaps due to a reward-oriented, punishment insensitive learning style. Children with CP and CU may benefit from personalizing behavioral treatment for them by emphasizing rewards and de-emphasizing punishm...

Despite high heritability, no research has followed children with ADHD to parenthood to study their offspring and parenting behaviors. Given greater prevalence of ADHD in males and lack of research involving fathers, this study evaluated offspring of fathers with and without ADHD histories for ADHD and disruptive behavior and compared fathers’ pare...

The purpose of the study was to estimate the burden to families of raising a child with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Data were drawn from a longitudinal sample recruited in western Pennsylvania. When participants were between 14 and 17 years old, parents completed a questionnaire assessing economic burden over the course of rais...

Adults with childhood attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) experience impairment in core functional domains (e.g., educational attainment, occupational status, social relationships, substance abuse, and criminal behavior), but it is currently unclear which impairments co-occur and whether subgroups experience differentiable patterns, non...