ADHD and anxiety symptom comorbidity from an event segmentation lens

Abstract

ADHD and anxiety present high comorbidity, including symptom overlap and related diagnostic and treatment challenges. The current study aimed to extend this area of research by investigating the event segmentation patterns of those with ADHD and anxiety symptoms. Event segmentation is the process of parsing a continuous flow of information into meaningful events, providing the opportunity to examine similarities and differences in how these groups organize their perception of daily experiences. Participants performed an event segmentation task consisting of watching four short movies and identifying large and small events. We used the total number of button presses and segmentation agreement scores in a multivariate analysis, and results indicated that the High ADHD group identified significantly more events in the large condition than the High Anxiety group and had significantly higher agreement scores than the Comorbid group. This study furthers our understanding of the cognitive overlap of ADHD and anxiety symptoms.