Children’s Cognitive Abilities Moderate Parent/Teacher Agreement on Internalizing and Externalizing Psychopathology

Abstract Multi-informant assessment (typically parents and teachers) is a gold-standard process used to inform diagnosis and tailor treatment in children, but multi-informant agreement is notoriously low. Children’s cognitive abilities might partially account for reporter discrepancies, particularly in situations when a child’s abilities are insufficient to meet context-specific demands (i.e., increased academic difficulties resulting in increased symptomatology at school compared to the home). Existing work examining this possibility has been limited to subjective reports of cognitive ability and/or neglected internalizing symptoms. The current study investigated whether objectively measured cognitive abilities moderate parent/teacher agreement on both externalizing and internalizing psychopathology in children. Parents and teachers of 853 school-age children (ages 8–12) rated children’s internalizing and externalizing symptoms, and children completed tasks assessing intellectual, academic, and executive functioning. Structural equation modeling was used to evaluate the latent interaction between parent-reported psychopathology and cognitive abilities when predicting teacher-reported psychopathology, thus testing whether cognitive abilities moderate parent/teacher agreement. Parent/teacher agreement on internalizing and externalizing symptoms was moderated by intellectual functioning and reading achievement, but not math skills or executive functioning. Stronger skills were associated with higher agreement, and post-hoc analyses indicated that lower cognitive abilities were associated with higher parent versus teacher concerns. Cognitive abilities moderate parent/teacher agreement, which may reflect the strength of the reporter’s knowledge of the child or reporter perceptions rather than context-based behavioral differences. Findings point to the importance of comprehensive assessment that gathers information from multiple informants and multiple domains to form a full-picture understanding of children’s functioning.