The Association between Parent and Child-Report Measures of Alexithymia in Children with and without Developmental Language Disorder.

Hannah Hobson,Neeltje P Van Den Bedem

doi:10.3390/ijerph18168309

Abstract

Accurate measures of alexithymia, an inability to recognise and describe one’s own emotions, that are suitable for children are crucial for research into alexithymia’s development. However, previous research suggests that parent versus child reports of alexithymia do not correlate. Potentially, children may report on the awareness of their emotions, whereas parent-report measures may reflect children’s verbal expression of emotion, which may be confounded by children’s communicative abilities, especially in conditions such as Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). Given theoretical arguments that alexithymia may develop due to language impairments, further research into alexithymia in DLD is also needed. This project examined parent and child report measures of alexithymia in children with DLD (n = 106) and without DLD (n = 183), and their association to children’s communication skills. Parent and child reports were not significantly correlated in either group, and children with DLD had higher alexithymia scores on the parent-report measure only. Thus, parent and child measures of alexithymia likely reflect different constructs. Pragmatic language problems related to more parent-reported alexithymia, over and above group membership. Structural language abilities were unrelated to alexithymia. We suggest decreased social learning opportunities, rather than a language measure artefact, underlie increased alexithymic difficulties in DLD.

Highlights

Alexithymia is a personality construct that encapsulates difficulties recognising and expressing one’s own affect
For our continuous factor approach, we examined the correlations between alexithymia measures and parent-reported communication problems, considering overall communication ability and communication subscale scores, to examine the relative contribution of pragmatic versus structural language problems
Our findings offer partial support to the ideas expressed in Hobson et al (2019), that the emotional difficulties reported in Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) may be explained through increased alexithymic difficulties in this group

Summary

Introduction

Alexithymia is a personality construct that encapsulates difficulties recognising and expressing one’s own affect. Children with alexithymic traits may experience negative arousal but be unable to correctly link their feelings to the cause of their emotion, or they may have difficulties expressing what they feel in a nuanced manner. Alexithymia has been shown to be elevated in a range of clinical populations [2,3,4], and to be associated with poorer socioemotional functioning [5,6,7] and poorer mental wellbeing [8,9]. Given these associations, a clear priority for researchers of alexithymia is understanding what leads to its development. Lombardo, and Auyeung [10] collected self-report and parent-report data from autistic

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion