Communicative challenges of Special Children

This posting is a follow up to my earlier posting titled "AQUA KASEH and Social Competence". Halberstadt, Denham, and Dunsmore in their paper titled Affective Social Competence (in Social Development, 10, 1, 2001, Blackwell Publisher Ltd. 2001) discussed on the need to conduct their research to understand Special Children social competence deficits. I had extracted from their paper the communicative issues faced by the nonnormative populations namely Autism, Behavior Disorder, and Maltreatment. These issues posed communicative challenges to the special children in their social competence development.

Autism

·         Less able to imitate others’ emotions (Hertzig, Snow, & Sherman, 1989)

·         Often facial expressions are incongruent to situation (McGee, Feldman, & Chernin, 1991)

·         Do not attend to social messages (Dawson, Meltzoff, Osterling, Rinaldi, & Brown, 1998; Osterling & Dawson, 1994)

·         Delayed understanding of basic, unequivocal emotional situation (not immediately show excitement); show deficit in comprehension of emotions caused by beliefs (Baron-Cohen, 1991)

·         Spend less time looking at distressed or fearful adults and focus on objects instead (Sigman, Kasari, Kwon, & Yirmiya, 1992)

·         Similar physiological experiences of the emotion event but more ambiguous facial expressions (Steinhilber, Jones, and Dunsmore, 1999)

·         Rarely engage in joint attention (Dawson, et al.,1998; Lewy & Dawson, 1992; Osterling & Dawson, 1994; Steinhilber, et al., 199)

Behavior disorder

• Send emotional messages that are proportionally more negative (American Psychiatric Association, 1987)
• Showed more extreme responses to a negative mood induction (Cole, Zahn-Waxler, Fox, Usher, & Welsh, 1996; Cole, Zahn-Waxler, & Smith, 1994)
• Deficits in ability to receive others’ emotional messages (Casey & Schlosser, 1994; Cook, Greenberg, & Kusche, 1994; Nowicki & Duke, 1994; Russell, Stokes, Jones, Czogalik, & Rohleder, 1993; but see Cole, Usher & Cargo, 1993)
• Spend less time scanning the social environment and, consequently, recall fewer details of emotional stimuli (Casey & Schlosser, 1994)
• More often attribute hostile intentionality to others (Casey & Schlosser, 1994; Dodge & Frame, 1982; Dodge, Murphy, & Buchsbaum, 1984; Dodge & Somberg, 1987)
• Less awareness of their own affective experience, and they clearly have more difficulty identifying and understanding their own feelings (Casey & Schlosser, 1994; Cook et al., 1994)
• Diminished abilities to constructively manage and regulate their emotions, may express emotions impulsively as they are felt (Greenberg, Kusche, & Speltz, 1991)
• Displaying anger at inappropriate times (Cole, et al., 1994);
• May show brittle control or denial of negative emotion (Cole, et al. 1994)
• Less well able to integrate nonverbal skills (Russell et al., 1993)

Maltreatment

·         Less likely to use internal state words; will do so in restricted manner (Beeghly & Cicchetti, 1994)

·         Less able to recognize photographs of child and adult expressions (During & McMahon, 1991)

·         Less able to recognize ‘pure’ and ‘masked’ emotions (Camras, Ribordy, & Hill, 1988; Cassidy et al., 1992)

·         Do not habituate to interadult hostility involving their mothers; they become aroused and aggressive themselves, attempting to help or comfort their mothers, or intervene in the conflict on their mother’s behalf (Cummings, Hennessey, Rabideau, & Cicchetti, 1994)

·         Show deficits on self-reported empathy measures (Straker & Jacobson, 1981)

·         Show more inappropriate responses (such as anger, aggression, or withdrawal to their peers’ distress (Howes & Eldredge, 1985; Klimes-Dougan & Kistner, 1990; Main & George, 1985)

·         Show more despressed/dysthymic and anxious affect (Toth, Manly & Cicchetti, 1992)

·         Show more anger and more situational inappropriate and inflexible emotions (Erickson, Egeland & Pianta, 1989; Shields, Cicchetti & Ryan, 1994)