The strength of the relations between behavioral disinhibition and response inhibition is particularly remarkable, given the quite different methodologies for measuring the two constructs (i.e., clinical measures and questionnaires for behavioral disinhibition vs. laboratory cognitive tasks for response inhibition). We note that our factor correlations are somewhat higher than those found between single cognitive or neuropsychological tasks and individual components of behavioral disinhibition such as ADHD (e.g., Willcutt et al., 2005). One likely explanation for these larger correlations is the power afforded by the latent variable approach. In particular, it appears that response inhibition may be a difficult construct to capture with individual measures (Friedman & Miyake, 2004) because of the large degree of task impurity (i.e., a substantial proportion of variance unrelated to inhibition) present in established response inhibition measures. However, the results of this study demonstrate that when measured as a latent variable, the response inhibition construct is tapping an important ability that has the potential to contribute to theoretical advances in our understanding of behavior problems.
