There are indications that children with autism have difficulties with emotion regulation. Therefore, the emotion regulation strategies of children with autism in comparison with typically...Show moreThere are indications that children with autism have difficulties with emotion regulation. Therefore, the emotion regulation strategies of children with autism in comparison with typically developing children were the target of this study. Because the development of emotion regulation skills is highly dependent on the influence of the mother, the empathy of the mother was also examined. The differences in emotion regulation strategies between children with autism and a non-clinical control group and the relationship with the empathy of the mother were tested in a laboratory session at Centre for Autism. The sample consisted of 53 mothers with their children, divided into a clinical group of children with autism (N = 19) and a non-clinical control group (N = 34). The age of the children varied between 41 and 81 months, with a mean of 56.91 months (SD = 11.27). To measure the emotion regulation strategies, the children were exposed to an anxiety-provoking situation: the Mechanical Toy Paradigm. The empathy of the mother was determined by the self-assessment questionnaire Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI). Children with autism showed significantly more avoidance and non-constructive emotion regulation strategies than children in the control group. No difference was found in the use of constructive emotion regulation strategies between children with autism and the control group. Mothers from the clinical group and control group did not differ in the degree of empathy. There was no significant correlation between empathy of the mother and emotion regulation strategies of the child. Conclusion: children with autism have difficulties with regulating their emotions and this was not related to empathy of the mother. There is a need for future research on the behave of improving emotion regulation strategies for children with autism. Interventions could include co-emotion regulation of the mother, because children with autism also seem to view their mother as a source of assistance.Show less
Background: Previous research showed inconsistent results on the effect of parenting on the mastery motivation of children. Little research has been done on the influence of child’s autism...Show moreBackground: Previous research showed inconsistent results on the effect of parenting on the mastery motivation of children. Little research has been done on the influence of child’s autism characteristics to the mastery motivation of children. Aim: The current study investigated whether positive parenting, negative parenting and autism characteristics were related to the instrumental and expressive mastery motivation. Method: In this study 48 mothers and children participated. The children (6 girls), were around 4 years of age (SD = 0.95). The instrumental and expressive mastery motivation were measured by the Dimensions Mastery Questionnaire. Parenting was measured by the Alabama Parenting Questionnaire and autism characteristics by the Social Responsiveness Scale for children. Results: Autism characteristics of the child were negatively related to instrumental mastery motivation. Specifically, less social motivation predicted less instrumental mastery motivation of children. Positive parenting and negative parenting were not related to instrumental mastery motivation. In addition, there were no relationships found between positive parenting, negative parenting, child’s autism characteristics and expressive mastery motivation of the child. Discussion: These results contribute to the growing knowledge of the relationship between parenting, autism characteristics and mastery motivation. Further research should focus on the relationship between autism characteristics and social, motor, cognitive and expressive mastery motivation measured physiological and by observation. The development of interventions to increase social motivation in children with autism characteristics is also key because it can benefit the instrumental mastery motivation.Show less
Previous research has shown that children with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have difficulties with emotion regulation. However, not much is known about the strategies that these children apply...Show morePrevious research has shown that children with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have difficulties with emotion regulation. However, not much is known about the strategies that these children apply when they regulate their emotions. Furthermore, parental emotion awareness may play an important role in emotion regulation strategies, but to our knowledge, this has not yet been studied. Therefore, the aim of the present study was to compare emotion regulation strategies between children with ASD and healthy controls while they experienced negative emotions. Furthermore, we examined whether maternal emotion awareness differed between mothers of children with ASD and mothers of healthy controls, and explored whether maternal emotion awareness was related to children’s emotion regulation strategies. Seventeen children with ASD and 25 typically developing children between the ages of 3 and 7 years were tested. Children performed a task that elicited frustration while their emotion regulation strategies were videotaped and later coded. The Bermond-Vorst Alexithymia Questionnaire (BVAQ) was used to assess maternal emotion awareness. Results showed that compared to healthy controls, children with ASD tended to use more alternate strategies and less goal-directed action while completing the task. Furthermore, children with ASD more often applied emotion regulation strategies in which they engaged in distraction, self-speech, vocal venting, and self-soothing. No differences were found in the use of social support seeking strategies. With respect to maternal emotion awareness, the results showed that mothers of children with ASD were less aware of their emotions than mothers of control children. In addition, when looking at the total sample, a relation was found between lower levels of maternal emotion awareness and the use of more distraction as an emotion regulation strategy. Implications for interventions and future research are discussed.Show less
Research master thesis | Developmental Psychopathology in Education and Child Studies (research) (MSc)
open access
2020-08-06T00:00:00Z
Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are characterized by communication deficits. Emotions are part of interpersonal communication and adequate use of emotions are vital for successful...Show moreChildren with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are characterized by communication deficits. Emotions are part of interpersonal communication and adequate use of emotions are vital for successful interaction. To see if children with ASD express emotions to the same extent, we compared 17 children with ASD (age range: 3-6 years) to 33 typically developing children of the same age on both on behavioral emotion expression and on psychophysiological arousal. The behavioral expression and psychophysiological parameters of emotion (heart rate and skin conductance level) were continuously measured during rest and a fear inducing paradigm. The groups did not differ on the intensity of negative or positive emotion expression. The ASD group had lower skin conductance levels during rest compared to the typically developing children and a more pronounced increase in psychophysiological arousal in response to a fear paradigm. To integrate these two separate measures of emotion, the concordance between the behavioral and psychophysiological components was evaluated. Negative emotions were related to heart rate in the ASD group and to skin conductance in the control group, but the strength of the correlation did not differ significantly between the two groups. Considering the health and behavioral risks associated with abnormal levels of emotional arousal, the specific effects of deviant emotional arousal in children with ASD need to be further explored. Targeting psychophysiological levels of arousal in interventions might be an effective approach to ameliorate challenging behavior in children with ASD.Show less
Qualitative impairments in social interactions is one of the problems children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) faced with. In a normal development there is a connection between the points the...Show moreQualitative impairments in social interactions is one of the problems children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) faced with. In a normal development there is a connection between the points the eyes are fixated on and the child’s social behavior. Previous research has found that children with ASD have atypical eye contact. The thesis of this present study was: “Can fixation on different emotions be related to social dysfunctioning and connected to autistic characteristics of young children and can the Theory of Mind (ToM) be used to explain this? The sample consisted of 18 children between 3,5 and 6 years old,with varying degrees of autistic behavior The research was based on a number of ASD-characteristics, the Social Responsiveness Scale (SRS) was used for this. The social cognition was measured by the ToM tasks from the NEPSY. The visual fixation patterns during watching videos of different emotions by these children were registered by the Tobii application. The results of the study show children with more autistic characteristics scored significantly different on fixation on objects, fixation on eyes (when they have a low score on Social Awareness) and Joint Attention (by a low score on Social Communication), but they did not show less attention to fixation on social areas (total fixation duration on faces, eyes, mouth and Joint Attention). So the fixation on different emotions can in specifics ways be connect to social dysfunctioning. No association was found between the fixation and the ToM. It is strongly recommended tot replicated this research, comparing a far larger clinical group of children with ASD to a control group. In this additional research more theories should be used to explain results and more. The additional research may well fully explain ASD in future, as a basis for developing suitable treatment, so children with ASD can develop optimally.Show less
