Research master thesis | Developmental Psychopathology in Education and Child Studies (research) (MSc)
closed access
The failure to speak of children with selective mutism (SM) has been conceptualized as a specific emotion regulation strategy to avoid extreme arousal in stressful (social) situations. However, the...Show moreThe failure to speak of children with selective mutism (SM) has been conceptualized as a specific emotion regulation strategy to avoid extreme arousal in stressful (social) situations. However, the underlying psychophysiological mechanisms of their failure to speak, and the development of these children over time, are still not well understood. The current study examined the arousal (heart rate and heart rate variability) of 33 children with SM and 42 typically developing children (comparison group, CG), aged 4 to 8 years, during rest and during a verbal and non-verbal social evaluation stress paradigm. Moreover, 18 children with SM participated in a follow-up measurement after almost all of them had received treatment. Children with SM had a significantly higher arousal during rest. However, their reactivity arousal (performance minus baseline) during a verbal and non-verbal stress task did not differ from the CG. Moreover, at the follow-up measurement, children with SM showed significantly lower baseline arousal compared to the first measurement, and no difference in verbal and non-verbal reactivity arousal. The results indicate that children with SM have elevated stress levels compared to typically developing children, even in a non-verbal situation. Over time, after treatment, their stress levels tend to ‘normalize’. These findings do not support the avoidance hypothesis and might indicate a more inflexible stress response to a stressful situation in children with SM compared to typically developing children.Show less
Research master thesis | Developmental Psychopathology in Education and Child Studies (research) (MSc)
open access
2014-08-16T00:00:00Z
The aim of this study was to expand the knowledge about the specific social-emotional difficulties within Klinefelter syndrome (47, XXY) by measuring attention to social cues, emotion recognition...Show moreThe aim of this study was to expand the knowledge about the specific social-emotional difficulties within Klinefelter syndrome (47, XXY) by measuring attention to social cues, emotion recognition skills, empathy and emotional arousal. 14 participants with Klinefelter syndrome (age range 16-56) and 14 control participants (age range 22-60) were included. All participants watched four video clips designed to evoke empathy, and filled out a questionnaire about their own and the main character’s emotions after each video. Furthermore, they completed an emotion recognition task consisting of 80 pictures of faces with a neutral, happy, scared or angry expression. During both tasks eye movements and fixations were measured. Electrocardiogram and skin conductance measurements were done at baseline, during the video clips and during the emotion recognition task. Participants with Klinefelter syndrome had equal emotion recognition scores compared to the control group, but empathy scores were lower for the Klinefelter group. Participants with Klinefelter spent less time fixating on eyes and more time fixating outside the face during the emotion recognition task. No group differences in overall fixation times were found during the videos, but longer fixations on eyes and mouths and shorter on objects predicted better empathy scores. Psychophysiological responses differed between groups during the empathy videos: participants with Klinefelter showed somewhat stronger skin conductance reactions than controls. The current results can contribute to the development of interventions for Klinefelter syndrome. Moreover, the results can give insight into the role of the X-chromosome in the relation between (social) attention processes and social-cognitive functioning.Show less
