Research master thesis | Developmental Psychopathology in Education and Child Studies (research) (MSc)
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Coregulation does not seem to come naturally to children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), putting them at risk of persistent emotional and behavioral dysregulation. However, little is known...Show moreCoregulation does not seem to come naturally to children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), putting them at risk of persistent emotional and behavioral dysregulation. However, little is known about factors related to the ability of parents to provide coregulatory support and the responsiveness of children with ASD to their attempts. The current study used the state space grid (SSG) methodology to provide insight into the patterns of coregulation between twelve children with ASD (3-6 years) and their parent who spent most time with them (11 mothers, 1 father). In search of characteristics of children and parents that may hinder coregulation, the association with the severity of ASD symptoms and behavioral problems in children, as well as the self-regulation abilities, parenting stress and psychopathology in parents was examined. A free play task was used to elicit interactions between parents and children that were later coded for emotional engagement of both to measure coregulation. Child and parent characteristics were assessed by administration of the Autism Diagnostic Observation Scale (ADOS-2) to children and completion of the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL), Behavior Rating Inventory of Executive Function for Adults (BRIEF-A), Parenting Stress Questionnaire (OBVL) and Brief Symptom Inventory (BSI) by their parents. Children with ASD generally had emotionally flexible interactions with their parents, indicating that they frequently changed between emotional engagement states when playing together. Their play interactions were mainly positive in nature and all parent-child dyads were able to repair the interaction following negativity or disengagement. More perceived externalizing behavior problems in children was related to less time to reengage in positive interactions with their parents and longer maintained mutual positivity. No association was found for the other characteristics of children and parents. These findings point to the added value of focusing in detail on parent-child interactions for future research and clinical practice.Show less
Research master thesis | Developmental Psychopathology in Education and Child Studies (research) (MSc)
closed access
Affective empathy and emotion recognition deficits are hypothesized to underlie impaired social interaction in children exhibiting antisocial behaviour. However, few studies have examined the...Show moreAffective empathy and emotion recognition deficits are hypothesized to underlie impaired social interaction in children exhibiting antisocial behaviour. However, few studies have examined the possible emotion recognition deficits and affective empathy. This study compared facial affect recognition, vocal emotion recognition and affective empathy of children at risk for criminal behaviour to that of normally developing children. It was expected that children at risk of criminal behaviour had impaired emotion recognition and affective empathy, and that emotion recognition deficits and affective empathy were partially related to each other. The high-risk children were recruited through and intervention project connected to several municipalities in the Netherlands, focusing on the underage siblings or children of delinquents and those exhibiting antisocial and disruptive behaviour according to teachers. Facial and vocal recognition of happy, sad, angry and fearful emotions were respectively measured with the Facial Emotion Recognition (FER) test and the Prosody test of the Amsterdam Neuropsychological Tasks (ANT). Affective empathy was assessed by recording heart rate (HR) while showing video clips with neutral and emotional content (happiness, fear, pain and sadness). It was found that the high-risk group were less able to recognize fear and sadness in still-faces, and had an overall lower percentage corrected when recognizing emotions from voices, compared to healthy controls. The high-risk group also showed reduced HR to pain and fear, but this was not related to emotion recognition deficits. These findings suggest that children that engage in antisocial behaviour have impaired emotion recognition and reduced affective empathy, but that lack of empathy cannot solely be explained by a less ability to recognize emotions.Show less
