Developmental deviation in delay discounting as a transdiagnostic indicator of risk for child psychopathology

Background The tendency to prefer smaller, immediate rewards over larger, delayed rewards is known as delay discounting (DD). Developmental deviations in DD may be key in characterizing psychiatric and neurodevelopmental disorders. Recent work empirically supported DD as a transdiagnostic process in various psychiatric disorders. Yet, there is a lack of research relating developmental changes in DD from mid‐childhood to adolescence to psychiatric and neurodevelopmental disorders. Additionally, examining the interplay between socioeconomic status/total household income (THI) and psychiatric symptoms is vital for a more comprehensive understanding of pediatric pathology and its complex relationship with DD. Methods The current study addresses this gap in a robust psychiatric sample of 1843 children and adolescents aged 5–18 (M = 10.6, SD = 3.17; 1,219 males, 624 females). General additive models (GAMs) characterized the shape of age‐related changes in monetary and food reward discounting for nine psychiatric disorders compared with neurotypical youth (NT; n = 123). Over 40% of our sample possessed a minimum of at least three psychiatric or neurodevelopmental disorders. We used bootstrap‐enhanced Louvain community detection to map DD‐related comorbidity patterns. We derived five subtypes based on diagnostic categories present in our sample. DD patterns were then compared across each of the subtypes. Further, we evaluated the effect of cognitive ability, emotional and behavioral problems, and THI in relation to DD across development. Results Higher discounting was found in six of the nine disorders we examined relative to NT. DD was consistently elevated across development for most disorders, except for depressive disorders, with age‐specific DD differences compared with NTs. Community detection analyses revealed that one comorbidity subtype consisting primarily of Attention‐Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) Combined Presentation and anxiety disorders displayed the highest overall emotional/behavioral problems and greater DD for the food reward. An additional subtype composed mainly of ADHD, predominantly Inattentive Presentation, learning, and developmental disorders, showed the greatest DD for food and monetary rewards compared with the other subtypes. This subtype had deficits in reasoning ability, evidenced by low cognitive and academic achievement performance. For this ADHD‐I and developmental disorders subtype, THI was related to DD across the age sp