Patterns of report on the hearing of parental voices by emotionally disturbed children

Abstract

A study of the differential perception of parental voices presented as competing stimuli is described. Thirty-two emotionally disturbed children were compared with a group of their siblings, and children from non-clinical families divided into one control group to match the disturbed children, and a second group to match the non-disturbed siblings of the patients. On two separate tracks of the same recording tape, the parents read statements carrying positive, negative and neutral affect. The sequences of the statements were so arranged as to cover the six permutations of the three affective tones plus the three affects paired with themselves. The children were asked to report on the words they heard when they listened through earphones to their parents recorded voices played at equal loudness simultaneously into both ears. The children also completed a Parent-Child Relationship Questionnaire, and a Parental Dominance questionnaire. A word report score was obtained by dividing the number of words a child reported correctly by the number of words recorded by a given parent. The parental voice with the highest total word report score was regarded as the preferentially heard voice. Ratios (preferred to non-preferred) of the total word report scores were also obtained. In all comparisons the ratios of the patient group were significantly higher than those of any of the other groups ( p<0·001 in all comparisons). None of the control groups differed significantly from one another. Very little overlap was found between preferred to non-preferred ratios of the patients and the other three groups, e.g. 27 of the 32 patients had preferred : non-preferred ratios greater than 1·5, whereas only 3 of the Sib group and one of the others had ratios greater than 1·5. All groups perceived affectively toned messages more accurately than relatively neutral messages. Relating verbalis scores to the questionnaires showed that the preferentially heard parent was rated higher on the Loving and Protecting scales ( p <0·05) than the non-preferentially heard parent. No significant relationship was found between total verbalisation scores and dominance ratings. The findings support the hypothesis that disturbed children have particular patterns of perceiving verbal communication within the family, and that these patterns are at least partially determined by the child's perception of the parent as rewarding or punishing.