Publications by authors named "Tycho Dekkers"

Although parenting interventions are recommended by major clinical guidelines for managing children's behavioral challenges, including ADHD, their uptake in clinical practice remains limited. Building on the contributions of Hodson et al. and Nijboer et al.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Behavioral parent training (BPT) is a well-established intervention for children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), but most programs are long, which may limit their accessibility. This could be improved by making programs shorter. Here, we studied (1) the feasibility of a new brief BPT program and its procedures, and (2) pre-post changes in daily rated problem behaviors (primary outcome), children's disruptive behaviors, ADHD/ODD characteristics, impairment, and parents' sense of parenting competence (secondary outcomes).

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Playfulness represents the disposition to play and has important mental health benefits. Children's playfulness is mainly rated by parents, teachers or trained assessors but playfulness is not always reflected in overt behavior. Fortunately, even young children are able to provide a perspective on their playfulness, as illustrated by research with the Child Self-Report Playfulness questionnaire (CSRP).

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: The access to and uptake of evidence-based behavioral parent training for children with behavioral difficulties (i.e., oppositional, defiant, aggressive, hyperactive, impulsive, and inattentive behavior) are currently limited because of a scarcity of certified therapists and long waiting lists.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Adolescents with mild-to-borderline intellectual disability face peer resistance challenges, risking harmful or dangerous situations.

Method: We designed a peer resistance group intervention at school for adolescents with mild-to-borderline intellectual disability, tested its feasibility (N = 4, M  = 14.1, M  = 78.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

An important setting to detect youth mental health problems and provide interventions is the school context, but effective and affordable school-based interventions are scarce and implementation of the available evidence-based interventions is limited. In this editorial, we highlight three issues and propose a research agenda. First, we emphasize that many of the mental health interventions currently used in school settings lack a solid evidence base.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Behavioural parent training is an evidence-based intervention for children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), but little is known about the extent to which initial benefits are maintained.

Aims: This meta-analytic review investigated longer-term (i.e.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

This multicenter randomized controlled trial investigated whether interactive virtual reality enhanced effectiveness of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) to reduce children's aggressive behavior problems. Boys with aggressive behavior problems (N = 115; M  = 10.58, SD = 1.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Currently, diagnostic criteria for ADHD mainly reflect behavioral symptoms, neglecting internal phenomena like mind-wandering. Recent studies found that mind-wandering explains impairment beyond ADHD symptoms in adults. To better capture ADHD-related impairment in adolescents, we aimed to elucidate whether mind-wandering is associated with impairments that are prevalent in adolescents (i.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is consistently associated with a host of social problems, such as victimization and difficulties in maintaining close friendships. These problems are not limited to offline relations but also manifest in the online social world, as previous research shows that ADHD is associated with problematic use of social media. Given the ubiquitous nature of social media, the goal of the current review is to understand why adolescents with ADHD demonstrate more problematic social media use than their typically developing peers.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: This preregistered study compares adolescents with mild-to-borderline intellectual disability (MBID) and typically developing (TD) adolescents on their susceptibility to peer influence. To understand why adolescents with MBID are susceptible to peer influence, links with inhibition, Theory of Mind (ToM) and negative interpretation bias are investigated.

Method: We assessed 163 adolescents (111 MBID, 52 TD 14-19 years; 63% boys) using experimental tasks and self- and/or teacher-reports.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

An important question in mental healthcare for children is whether treatments are effective and safe in the long run. Here, we comment on a recent editorial perspective by Roest et al. (2022), who argue, based on an overview of systematic reviews, 'that there is no convincing evidence that interventions for the most common childhood disorders are beneficial in the long term'.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: This metaregression analysis examined which behavioral techniques that are commonly used in behavioral parent and teacher training programs for children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) were related to program effectiveness on children's behavioral outcomes.

Methods: We included 32 randomized controlled trials (N = 2594 children) investigating behavioral parent training, teacher training, or a combination, in children with ADHD under 18 years. Outcomes were symptom counts of total ADHD, inattention, and hyperactivity-impulsivity and behavioral problems.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Behavioral parent training is an evidence-based intervention for children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), but knowledge on the differential effects of behavioral techniques for specific subgroups of children is very limited. Attachment representations of children with ADHD may affect how receptive children are to changes in parenting. In this study, we investigated whether specific behavioral techniques were more or less effective for children with ADHD in relation to their attachment representations.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Impulsivity is a core feature of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Previous work using the delay discounting task to assess impulsivity reveals that adolescents with ADHD tend to prefer a smaller-immediate reward over a larger-delayed reward, and this relates to problematic choices in daily life. To gain a better understanding of daily decision-making in adolescence, it is important to examine the social context, as peers have a major influence on decisions.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Impulsive and risky decision-making peaks in adolescence, and is consistently associated with the neurodevelopmental disorder Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), regardless of age. In this brief review, we demonstrate the similarity of theoretical models explaining impulsive and risky decision-making that originate in two relatively distinct literatures (i.e.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) in children is associated with several adverse family characteristics, such as higher parenting stress, more conflicted parent-child relationships, lower parental competence, and higher levels of parental psychopathology. Hence, children with ADHD more often grow up under suboptimal circumstances, which may impact the development of their attachment representations. Here, we investigated whether children with ADHD have more insecure and disorganized attachment representations than their typically developing peers, and which factors could explain this association.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Objective: Behavioral parent training is an evidence-based intervention for children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), but it is unknown which of its components are most effective. This meta-regression analysis investigated which specific behavioral techniques that parents learn in parent training are associated with effects on parental outcomes.

Method: A search was performed for randomized controlled trials on parent training for children with ADHD, with positive parenting, negative parenting, parenting sense of competence, parent-child relationship quality, and parental mental health as outcome measures.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Behavioral parent and teacher training and stimulant medication are recommended interventions for children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). However, not all children with ADHD receive this evidence-based care, and the aim of the current study was to find out why. More specifically, we investigated clinicians' policy, guideline use, and attitudes towards medication and parent training when treating children with ADHD, as well as several factors that could affect this.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Parents of children with ADHD experience several difficulties while raising their children and report lower levels of knowledge about their children's life and behaviors. A recent study found that low levels of parental knowledge mediated the association between ADHD symptoms and risk-taking behavior (RTB) in adolescents. The current study aimed to investigate this previous finding further by replicating it, by taking peer influence into account as additional social factor of importance and by extending it and also investigate the role of parental knowledge in the association between ADHD symptoms and homework problems.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Excessive gross motor activity is a prominent feature of children with ADHD, and accruing evidence indicates that their gross motor activity is significantly higher in situations associated with high relative to low working memory processing demands. It remains unknown, however, whether children's gross motor activity rises to an absolute level or accelerates incrementally as a function of increasingly more difficult cognitive processing demands imposed on the limited capacity working memory (WM) system - a question of both theoretical and applied significance. The present investigation examined the activity level of 8- to 12-year-old children with ADHD ( = 36) and Typically Developing (TD) children ( = 24) during multiple experimental conditions: a control condition with no storage and negligible WM processing demands; a short-term memory (STM) storage condition; and a sequence of WM conditions that required both STM and incrementally more difficult higher-order cognitive processing.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Adolescents with ADHD demonstrate increased risk-taking behavior (RTB) like substance abuse and dangerous traffic conduct. RTB in adolescence is more likely under peer influence. The current investigation (1) tests the hypothesis that adolescents with ADHD are particularly susceptible to such influence and (2) tests whether groups differed in autonomic reactivity to peer influence.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF