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We observed gendered coping strategies and conflict resolution outcomes used by adolescents and parents during a conflict discussion task to evaluate associations with current and later adolescent psychopathology. We studied 137 middle- to upper-middle-class, predominantly Caucasian families of adolescents (aged 11-16 years, 65 males) who represented a range of psychological functioning, including normative, subclinical, and clinical levels of problems. Adolescent coping strategies played key roles both in the extent to which parent-adolescent dyads resolved conflict and in the trajectory of psychopathology symptom severity over a 2-year period. Gender-prototypic adaptive coping strategies were observed in parents but not youth, (i.e., more problem solving by fathers than mothers and more regulated emotion-focused coping by mothers than fathers). Youth-mother dyads more often achieved full resolution of conflict than youth-father dyads. There were generally not bidirectional effects among youth and parents' coping across the discussion except boys' initial use of angry/hostile coping predicted fathers' angry/hostile coping. The child was more influential than the parent on conflict resolution. This extended to exacerbation/alleviation of psychopathology over 2 years: higher conflict resolution mediated the association of adolescents' use of problem-focused coping with decreases in symptom severity over time. Lower conflict resolution mediated the association of adolescents' use of angry/hostile emotion coping with increases in symptom severity over time. Implications of findings are considered within a broadened context of the nature of coping and conflict resolution in youth-parent interactions, as well as on how these processes impact youth well-being and dysfunction over time.

Theories of attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) increasingly highlight the role of neuropsychological impairment in ADHD; however, a consistent and identifiable pattern of performance on tests is not well established. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) Executive Abilities: Measures and Instruments for Neurobehavioral Evaluation and Research (EXAMINER) battery provides measures of common variance across multiple executive function tests within specific domains and was used to characterize which executive functions are most affected in children with ADHD. Thirty-two children (24 male), ages 8-15 years (M = 12.02; SD = 2.29), diagnosed with ADHD and no comorbid disorder completed the NIH EXAMINER battery. Sixty age and gender matched healthy controls were chosen from a database of participants enrolled in the NIH EXAMINER multi-site study. Children with ADHD performed worse on the working memory score compared with the controls. No differences were found on the cognitive control or fluency scores. For children with ADHD, poorer working memory performance predicted parent report of child learning problems. Cognitive control and fluency scores did not predict learning problems. In summary, working memory emerges as a primary impairment in children with ADHD who have no comorbid disorders. Furthermore, working memory weaknesses may underlie the academic problems often seen in children with ADHD.