Confirmatory Factor Analysis on Mental Health Status using ABCD Cohort.

The general psychopathology factor (p factor), derived from a wide range of psychological symptoms, is proposed to approximate an individual’s tendency to develop a broad range of psychiatric disorders. The aim of this study was to extract the general p factor in a bifactor model from confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), as well as internalizing and externalizing factors, and test the stability of the factors derived from different behavioral measures. Using data from the Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development (ABCD) study, we compared the latent factors derived from Child Behavior Checklist measure (a standard approach) with those from broader measures. Multiple linear regression was used to assess the relationship of the p factor with other behavioral or cognition measures and clinical diagnoses. The results showed that the p factor had greater stability and a higher correlation between models (r=0.87) than internalizing and externalizing factors (r=0.32,0.02, respectively). The p factor explained significant variances in all dimensional behavioral variables as well as neurocognition and was significantly related to all mental disorders available. A mixed-effects model was constructed to measure the association of the p factor with screen time activity, sleep duration, physical activity, household income, and gender (altogether, these explained 8.02% of the variance in the p factor). The findings from this study also show that the general p factor defined in the bifactor model has sufficient determinacy.