The role of attention in the affective life of people with severe or profound intellectual disabilities

Parent-perceived autonomy-supportive experiences and basic psychological needs of people with complex support needs: Development and preliminary psychometric evaluation of two questionnaires

Background: Understanding and supporting basic psychological needs of persons with complex support needs is important but difficult because of communicative challenges . We developed and tested questionnaires to obtain parents' perspectives on autonomy support and basic psychological needs of autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Method: Two parent-informant questionnaires were developed, administered, and subjected to psychometric property analyses. Participants were 63 Dutch parents of persons diagnosed with severe or profound intellectual and multiple disabilities. Results: Principal component analyses revealed a one-factor structure for the Parental Perceptions on Autonomy-Supportive Experiences questionnaire, while the Parental Perceptions on Basic Psychological Need Signals questionnaire yielded two-factors interpreted as Noticing Signals of Autonomy and Noticing Signals of Competence/Relatedness. Evidence for construct validity was found for both instruments. Conclusions: Preliminary evaluation of the new questionnaires is encouraging, but further validation with a larger sample size is warranted.

Parent-child interaction: A micro-level sequential approach in children with a significant cognitive and motor developmental delay

BACKGROUND & AIMS

Previous research indicates that young children with a significant cognitive and motor developmental delay show low levels of interactive engagement, their parents are generally responsive towards them and these variables are positively correlated. Adapting a micro-level approach, we aim to go beyond macro-level and correlational analyses by charting the frequency, intra-individual co-occurrence and inter-individual temporal dependency of specific interactive behaviors.

METHODS & PROCEDURES

Twenty-nine parent-child dyads (with children aged 6-59 months) were video-taped during a 15-minute unstructured play situation. Based on a self-developed coding scheme, interactive behaviors were coded continuously and analyzed using a three-step sequential analysis approach.

OUTCOMES & RESULTS

Parents and children systematically combine either more socially-oriented or more object-oriented behaviors. Socially-oriented behaviors are less frequent in children, especially looking at and touching the partner occurs less. Socially- and object-oriented behavioral clusters are generally independent from each other and instigate/maintain the same type of behaviors in the interaction partner. While children's socially oriented behavior(al cluster)s seem to need a parental 'trigger', parents will more often independently engage with their child despite low child responsiveness.

CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS

Further intervention-oriented research is needed to confirm this study's results and translate them into concrete guidelines for parents.

Young children with significant developmental delay differentiate home observed attachment behaviour towards their parents

BACKGROUND

The hallmark of attachment is that contact, proximity and relief from stress are sought from specific individuals, laying important groundwork for healthy socioemotional functioning. This study investigated the extent to which differentiated attachment behaviour can be observed in young children with significant developmental delay (DD).

METHOD

Video-taped observations of the parent-child and stranger-child interaction were conducted at home and complemented with questionnaires in 20 families with a child with significant DD (age 2-7 years with an average DD of 49 months).

RESULTS

Children displayed more intense and persistent contact-seeking, contact-maintaining and resistant behaviour in the episodes with their parent compared to the episodes with the stranger. Parent-reported secure attachment behaviour was slightly more characteristic towards mother compared to father.

CONCLUSIONS

Even children with significant DD develop differentiated attachment behaviour. Detailed observations may support parents in identifying the interactions that make the attachment relationship with their child special.

Measuring happiness in individuals with profound multiple disabilities

This quantitative study assessed whether presentation of preferred items and activities during multiple periods of the day (and over multiple days) increased indices of happiness (over time/sustained) in individuals with PMD. A multiple baseline design across participants was utilized to measure changes in indices of happiness of the participants. Participants were recruited from an adult day activity program specializing in providing assistance to individuals with disabilities. For Mary, baseline indices of happiness were 26.67% of intervals, increasing 6.76% during intervention to 33.43%. For Caleb, baseline indices of happiness were 20.84% of intervals, increasing 6.34% during intervention to 27.18%. For Mark, baseline indices of happiness were 40.00% of intervals, increasing 12.75% during intervention to 52.75%. Overall interobserver agreement was 82.8%, with interobserver agreement observations occurring during 63.04% of the observations. The results of the investigation demonstrated that presenting preferred items and activities increased the indices of happiness compared to baseline rates of indices of happiness. Results may have been more robust if the participants were assessed for overall responsiveness patterns prior to the initiation of measurement of indices of happiness.