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The Association between Parent and Child-Report Measures of Alexithymia in Children with and without Developmental Language Disorder

Accurate measures of alexithymia, an inability to recognise and describe one’s own emotions, that are suitable for children are crucial for research into alexithymia’s development. However, previous research suggests that parent versus child reports of alexithymia do not correlate. Potentially, chil...

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Autores principales: Hobson, Hannah, van den Bedem, Neeltje P.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8394040/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34444058
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18168309
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author Hobson, Hannah
van den Bedem, Neeltje P.
author_facet Hobson, Hannah
van den Bedem, Neeltje P.
author_sort Hobson, Hannah
collection PubMed
description Accurate measures of alexithymia, an inability to recognise and describe one’s own emotions, that are suitable for children are crucial for research into alexithymia’s development. However, previous research suggests that parent versus child reports of alexithymia do not correlate. Potentially, children may report on the awareness of their emotions, whereas parent-report measures may reflect children’s verbal expression of emotion, which may be confounded by children’s communicative abilities, especially in conditions such as Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). Given theoretical arguments that alexithymia may develop due to language impairments, further research into alexithymia in DLD is also needed. This project examined parent and child report measures of alexithymia in children with DLD (n = 106) and without DLD (n = 183), and their association to children’s communication skills. Parent and child reports were not significantly correlated in either group, and children with DLD had higher alexithymia scores on the parent-report measure only. Thus, parent and child measures of alexithymia likely reflect different constructs. Pragmatic language problems related to more parent-reported alexithymia, over and above group membership. Structural language abilities were unrelated to alexithymia. We suggest decreased social learning opportunities, rather than a language measure artefact, underlie increased alexithymic difficulties in DLD.
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spelling pubmed-83940402021-08-28 The Association between Parent and Child-Report Measures of Alexithymia in Children with and without Developmental Language Disorder Hobson, Hannah van den Bedem, Neeltje P. Int J Environ Res Public Health Article Accurate measures of alexithymia, an inability to recognise and describe one’s own emotions, that are suitable for children are crucial for research into alexithymia’s development. However, previous research suggests that parent versus child reports of alexithymia do not correlate. Potentially, children may report on the awareness of their emotions, whereas parent-report measures may reflect children’s verbal expression of emotion, which may be confounded by children’s communicative abilities, especially in conditions such as Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). Given theoretical arguments that alexithymia may develop due to language impairments, further research into alexithymia in DLD is also needed. This project examined parent and child report measures of alexithymia in children with DLD (n = 106) and without DLD (n = 183), and their association to children’s communication skills. Parent and child reports were not significantly correlated in either group, and children with DLD had higher alexithymia scores on the parent-report measure only. Thus, parent and child measures of alexithymia likely reflect different constructs. Pragmatic language problems related to more parent-reported alexithymia, over and above group membership. Structural language abilities were unrelated to alexithymia. We suggest decreased social learning opportunities, rather than a language measure artefact, underlie increased alexithymic difficulties in DLD. MDPI 2021-08-05 /pmc/articles/PMC8394040/ /pubmed/34444058 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18168309 Text en © 2021 by the authors. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Article
Hobson, Hannah
van den Bedem, Neeltje P.
The Association between Parent and Child-Report Measures of Alexithymia in Children with and without Developmental Language Disorder
title The Association between Parent and Child-Report Measures of Alexithymia in Children with and without Developmental Language Disorder
title_full The Association between Parent and Child-Report Measures of Alexithymia in Children with and without Developmental Language Disorder
title_fullStr The Association between Parent and Child-Report Measures of Alexithymia in Children with and without Developmental Language Disorder
title_full_unstemmed The Association between Parent and Child-Report Measures of Alexithymia in Children with and without Developmental Language Disorder
title_short The Association between Parent and Child-Report Measures of Alexithymia in Children with and without Developmental Language Disorder
title_sort association between parent and child-report measures of alexithymia in children with and without developmental language disorder
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8394040/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34444058
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18168309
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