Parent–Child Interaction in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder and Their Siblings: Choosing a Coding Strategy

The parent-child interaction strongly influences the emotional, behavioural, and cognitive development of young children. The nature of parent-child interactions differs in families with children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), but research still entails a lot of inconsistencies and there is no consensus as to how these interactions should be coded. The parent-child interaction between sixteen mothers and their child with ASD (M _age?=?68 months) and a younger sibling without ASD (M _age?=?48 months) in a within-family study were coded using both a global and frequency coding scheme. Global and frequency codes of the same sample were compared to explore the value of each coding method and how they could complement each other. In addition, each coding method’s ability to detect group differences was evaluated. We found that mothers used an interaction style characterized by more support and structure, and clearer instructions in interaction with their children without ASD. In addition, global rating results suggested that within the ASD group, mothers may adapt their behaviour to the specific abilities of their child. Regarding the evaluation of coding method, results showed overlap between conceptually similar constructs included in both coding schemes. Although frequency coding clearly has its value, more qualitative aspects of the interaction were better captured by global rating scales and global rating was more time efficient. For this purpose, global ratings might be preferable over frequency coding.     

Parental meta-emotion structure predicts family and child outcomes

Abstract

Fifty-six families with a preschool child whose parents varied widely in parental marital satisfaction were studied at two time points: at time-I when the children were 5 years old and again at time-2 when the children were 8 years old. At time-1 each parent was separately interviewed about their “meta-emotion structure”, that is, their feelings about their own emotions, and their attitudes, and responses to their children's anger and sadness. Their behaviour during this interview was coded with a meta-emotion coding system. Two meta-emotion variables were studied for each parent, awareness of the parent's own sadness, and parental “coaching” of the child's anger. We termed the high end of these variables an “emotion coaching” (EC) meta-emotion structure. Meta-emotion structure was found to relate to time-1 marital and parent-child interaction. EC-type parents had marriages that were less hostile and they were less negative and more positive during parent-child interaction. Their children showed less evidence of physiological stress, greater ability to focus attention, and had less negative play with their best friends. At time-2 those children showed higher academic achievement in mathematics and reading had fewer behaviour problems, and were physically healthier than non-EC parents. The relations between child outcome and parental meta-emotion structure were not explained by social class variables, emotional expressiveness, or the greater happiness and stability of parents with an EC-type meta-emotion structure.     

Adult recasts as fluency-facilitators in preschoolers who stutter: Evidence from FluencyBank

Adult conversational recasts are based on child platform utterances that contain errors (e.g., Child: “Me going.” Adult: “Yes, you are going”), and recasts are effective in the child language literature. For many years, adult recasts of preschoolers’ stuttered utterances were surmised as fluency-facilitating, but to date, no evidence has been reported to support their efficacy. The purpose was to investigate the natural occurrence of, and the fluency-facilitating potential of, recasts produced by caregivers and clinicians/examiners in free-play interactions transcribed from audio or video recordings on FluencyBank. Forty-three participants with a median age of 38 mo (3;2) (Range=28–73 mo), including 32 boys and 11 girls were selected from five databases, and recasts which were near-imitations and simple recasts as per Weiss (2002) were identified. One database chosen was the Illinois project, to include a subgroup of persistent (n = 9) and recovered children (n = 9). In the 43 participants, significantly (p < 0.0001) fewer stutters and lower percent syllables stuttered (%SS) were observed in post-recast utterances (4%SS) as compared to post-nonrecast utterances (12.5%SS). The CWS-persistent subgroup (n = 9) did not fit the group trend of the 34 others who significantly differed in stuttering frequency post-nonrecast versus postrecast. Findings are taken to mean that adult conversational recasts of preschoolers’ stuttered utterances are fluency-facilitating, and interpretations are addressed.     

Validity of a Brief Measure of Parental Affective Attitudes in High-Risk Preschoolers

The current study investigated psychometric properties of the Family Affective Attitude Rating Scale (FAARS) for assessing parents' thoughts and feelings about their child, coded from a 5-min speech sample. Parental affective attitudes derive from previous experiences of parenting and child behavior, representations of the parent-child relationship and broader parental characteristics. Data were collected from mother-child dyads at ages 2 and 3 (N?=?731; 49?% female) from a multi-ethnic and high-risk community sample. Multi-informant observations of parenting and questionnaire measures were used to test construct and discriminant validity. FAARS showed good internal consistency and high inter-rater agreement. Affective attitudes were related to mothers' perceptions of their daily hassles, their reports of conflict with their child, and observed measures of positive and harsh parenting. Negative affective attitudes uniquely predicted later child problem behavior, over and above maternal reports of and observed measures of parenting. Overall, results support the validity of FAARS coding in mothers of preschoolers, a previously untested group. FAARS is a novel measure, directly assessing maternal perceptions of the parent-child relationship, and indirectly providing an index of maternal affect, stress, and depressive symptoms. Its brevity and cost-effectiveness further enhance the potential use of the FAARS measure for clinical and research settings.     

Describing parent-child interaction during exploration: situation definitions and negotiations

A coding scheme based on Wertsch's (1983) extension of Vygotsky's ideas about adult-child interaction in the zone of proximal development was used to analyze parent-child interaction during exploration. Sixty children, 3 to 6 years old, were videotaped while exploring novel objects in 15-min sessions with their mothers and fathers. Clusters of verbal and nonverbal behavior were used to code how participants defined the situation in each 15-s interval of each session in terms of one of nine categories. When parent-child mismatches occurred, the participants' negotiations of an intersubjective definition were coded, and child and parent questions were coded for complexity, complexity and appropriateness of response, and function. Results indicated that parent and child definitions matched almost 80% of the time, usually around exploration by the child with attention of or collaboration by the adult. Fathers tended to be more didactic than mothers.     

Multiple Determinants of Externalizing Behavior in 5-Year-Olds: A Longitudinal Model

In a community sample of 116 children, assessments of parent-child interaction, parent-child attachment, and various parental, child, and contextual characteristics at 15 and 28 months and at age 5 were used to predict externalizing behavior at age 5, as rated by parents and teachers. Hierarchical multiple regression analysis and path analysis yielded a significant longitudinal model for the prediction of age 5 externalizing behavior, with independent contributions from the following predictors: child sex, partner support reported by the caregiver, disorganized infant-parent attachment at 15 months, child anger proneness at 28 months, and one of the two parent-child interaction factors observed at 28 months, namely negative parent-child interactions. The other, i.e., a lack of effective guidance, predicted externalizing problems only in highly anger-prone children. Furthermore, mediated pathways of influence were found for the parent-child interaction at 15 months (via disorganized attachment) and parental ego-resiliency (via negative parent-child interaction at 28 months).

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Syntagmatically oriented reactions in the early phases of speech development]

Within a longitudinal observational study of two children aged from 18 to 36 months spontaneous reactive utterances were analysed. It could be found syntagmatic reactions without topic coherence with the utterances of the previous speaker. The specialty of these utterances consists in the fact that the child, after having perceived certain words in the parental utterances, creates an association to the previously heard grammatical context. The results are discussed within the scope of problems of language acquisition in children.     

Children's understanding and production of verbal irony in family conversations

This study examined how children use and understand various forms of irony (sarcasm, hyperbole, understatement, and rhetorical questions) in the context of naturalistic positive and negative family conversations in the home. Instances of ironic language in conversations between mothers, fathers, and their two children (M_ages=6.33 and 4.39 years) were recorded during six 90‐min observations for each of 39 families. Children's responses to others' ironic utterances were coded for their understanding of meaning and conversational function. Mothers were especially likely to ask rhetorical questions and to use ironic language in conflictual contexts. In contrast, fathers used hyperbole and understatement as frequently as rhetorical questions, and employed ironic language in both positive and conflictual contexts. Children also showed evidence of a nascent ability to use ironic language, especially hyperbole and rhetorical questions. Family members used rhetorical questions and understatement proportionately more often in a negative interaction context. Finally, older siblings understood irony better than younger siblings, and both children's responses revealed some understanding of ironic language, particularly sarcasm and rhetorical questions. Overall, the results suggest that family conversations in the home may be one important context for the development of children's use and understanding of ironic language.     

A procedure for studying online conversational processing using a chat bot

This article reports the development of a tool for examining the social and cognitive processes of people involved in a conversational interaction. Research on how people process utterances while they are actually engaged in an interaction has been extremely rare. To that end, we have developed a conversational bot (computer program designed to mimic human communication) with which participants can chat in a format similar to instant messaging. This program allows for the recording of comprehension speed, and it can be interfaced with secondary tasks (e.g., lexical decisions) in order to examine online conversational processing. Additional research possibilities with this program are discussed.     

Parent-Child Interactions in Anxious Families

A considerable amount of research has examined factors associated with the etiology and maintenance of anxiety disorders in children. The familial nature of anxiety has been well-established, with genetic studies showing that approximately 30% of the variance is accounted for by genetic factors. Research into the family environment documents behavioral differences in interactions between non-anxious parent-child and anxious parent-child dyads, including less granting of autonomy, and parental withdrawal and disengagement. Recent theoretical work in the field of anxiety suggests that attachment models and coercive operant patterns could create a bi-directional coercive interaction pattern, similar to that seen in interactions of parents and aggressive children. The current study investigated parent and child behaviors coded from interaction tasks across four groups based on anxiety status: anxious parent/anxious child, non-anxious parent/anxious child, anxious parent/non-anxious child, and non-anxious parent/non-anxious child to empirically examine hypothesized interactive patterns. The study sample consisted of 158 parent-child (ages 3–12 years) dyads. Results support an interaction between parent and child anxiety on behavior within dyads. The current study provides an important step in identifying processes linked to familial anxiety.     

长时间相处是亲子关系的保护性因素吗？——疫情背景下基于微博大数据的质性分析

目的：采用大数据技术与质性分析相结合的方式,探索疫情期间青少年长时间与父母相处的条件下,亲子冲突的演变特征。方法：利用Python3.8编写程序,以“亲子冲突、初中生、高中生、青少年、冲突、父母、与父母冲突”等为关键词在微博平台上搜索个人发布的内容,经数据整理,选择286条微博文本纳入文本分析,用NVivo12质性分析软件辅助编码。结果：亲子冲突的表达包含了冲突诱因、冲突类型、冲突领域,和冲突管理策略等四个方面的特征。结论：研究建构了冲突诱因、冲突领域、冲突类型和冲突应对策略之间的关系模型。亲子冲突的发生是在社会文化背景下,由于家庭功能失调引发的亲子互动方式异常。亲子冲突发生以后,取积极应对策略有助于家庭功能的良性调节。     

Generation and evaluation of user tailored responses in multimodal dialogue

When people engage in conversation, they tailor their utterances to their conversational partners, whether these partners are other humans or computational systems. This tailoring, or adaptation to the partner takes place in all facets of human language use, and is based on a mental model or a user model of the conversational partner. Such adaptation has been shown to improve listeners’ comprehension, their satisfaction with an interactive system, the efficiency with which they execute conversational tasks, and the likelihood of achieving higher level goals such as changing the listener’s beliefs and attitudes. We focus on one aspect of adaptation, namely the tailoring of the content of dialogue system utterances for the higher level processes of persuasion, argumentation and advice-giving. Our hypothesis is that algorithms that adapt content for these processes, according to a user model, will improve the usability, efficiency, and effectiveness of dialogue systems. We describe a multimodal dialogue system and algorithms for adaptive content selection based on multi-attribute decision theory. We demonstrate experimentally the improved efficacy of system responses through the use of user models to both tailor the content of system utterances and to manipulate their conciseness.     

Dyadic parent-child interaction during early childhood: contributions of parental and child personality traits

Individual differences in personality play a major role for functioning in a multitude of important life domains, including one's interpersonal relationships. The present study examined the effects of parental personality and child temperament traits on dyadic parent-child interaction during early childhood. Participants were a community sample of 145 mothers, 145 fathers, and their 3- to 6-year-old children. Child traits were assessed using standardized laboratory paradigms, parents reported on their own traits, and parent-child interaction was assessed observationally. Parental positive emotionality, negative emotionality, and constraint subtraits were related to parental responsiveness; the number and type of parental bids and the quality of parental responsiveness were also a function of child positive emotionality and effortful control subtraits and, for mothers, child negative emotionality subtraits. Child traits were related to their own interaction behaviors; children higher on positive emotionality subtraits made more social bids, and children higher on effortful control subtraits made more influence attempts and fewer negative bids; child positive emotionality and effortful control subtraits were associated with higher quality child responsiveness. Findings speak to coherence in personality constructs across the life span, with comparable traits measured in adults and early childhood-aged children demonstrating remarkably consistent effects on dyadic interaction behavior.     

Perceived parent-child relational qualities and parental behavioral and psychological control in Chinese adolescents in Hong Kong

Chinese secondary school students (N = 3,017) were asked to respond to instruments measuring their perceived parent-child relational qualities (parental trust of the child, child's trust of parents, child's readiness to communicate with parents, and child's satisfaction with parental control), parental behavioral control (including indicators of knowledge, expectation, monitoring, discipline, and demandingness), and parental psychological control. Results showed that parental trust of the child and child's trust of parents were positively related to child's readiness to communicate with the parents and satisfaction with parental control. While parental trust of the child and child's trust of parents were basically negatively related to different aspects of behavioral control (except parental knowledge), readiness to communicate with the parents and satisfaction with parental control were positively associated with parental control. Parent-child relational quality measures were negatively related to psychological control. Relative to measures of parental behavioral control, parental psychological control was a stronger predictor of parent-child relational qualities. The present findings clarify the parent-child relational quality correlates of parental behavioral and psychological control.     

Childhood stuttering and speech disfluencies in relation to children's mean length of utterance: a preliminary study

The purpose of this study was to examine the influence of utterance length and complexity relative to the children's mean length of utterance (MLU) on stuttering-like disfluencies (SLDs) for children who stutter (CWS) and nonstuttering-like disfluencies (nonSLDs) for children who do not stutter (CWNS). Participants were 12 (3;1-5;11, years;months) children: 6 CWS and 6 age-matched (+/-5 months) CWNS, with equal numbers in each talker group (CWS and CWNS) exhibiting MLU from the lower to the upper end of normal limits. Data were based on audio-video recordings of each child in two separate settings (i.e., home and laboratory) during loosely structured, 30-min parent-child conversational interactions and analyzed in terms of each participant's utterance length, MLU, frequency and type of speech disfluency. Results indicate that utterances above children's MLU are more apt to be stuttered or disfluent and that both stuttering-like as well as nonstuttering-like disfluencies are most apt to occur on utterances that are both long and complex. Findings were taken to support the hypothesis that the relative "match" or "mismatch" between linguistic components of an utterance (i.e., utterance length and complexity) and a child's language proficiency (i.e., MLU) influences the frequency of the child's stuttering/speech disfluency. EDUCATIONAL OBJECTIVES: The reader will learn about and be able to: (1) compare different procedures for assessing the relationship among stuttering, length and complexity of utterance, (2) describe the difference between relative and absolute measures of utterance length, (3) discuss the measurement and value of mean length of utterance and its possible contributions to childhood stuttering, and (4) describe how length and complexity influence nonstuttering-like disfluencies of children who stutter as well as the stuttering-like disfluencies of children who do not stutter.     

Parental language and verbal responsiveness to children in crowded homes.

This article is a secondary data analysis of the University of Kansas Language Acquisition Project, which intensively studied, on a regular basis, parent and child language from age 6 months to 30 months. The association between residential density and parent-child speech was examined. Parents in crowded homes speak in less complex, sophisticated ways with their children compared with parents in uncrowded homes, and this association is mediated by parental responsiveness. Parents in more crowded homes are less verbally responsive to their children. This in turn accounts for their simpler, less sophisticated speech to their children. This mediational pathway is evident with statistical controls for socioeconomic status. This model may help explain prior findings showing a link between residential crowding and delayed cognitive development.     

Are parenting practices associated with the development of narcissism? Findings from a longitudinal study of Mexican-origin youth

Narcissism is an important and consequential aspect of personality, yet we know little about its developmental origins. Using data from a longitudinal study of 674 Mexican-origin families, we examined cross-lagged relations between parenting behaviors (warmth, hostility, monitoring) and narcissism (superiority, exploitativeness). Parental hostility at age 12 was associated with higher levels of exploitativeness at age 14, whereas parental monitoring at age 12 was associated with lower levels of exploitativeness at age 14. These effects replicated across three different parenting measures: child reports, spouse reports, and behavioral coding of parent-child interactions. None of the parenting dimensions was related to superiority, suggesting that parenting practices are more strongly related to the maladaptive than the adaptive component of narcissism.     

An automatic analysis method of utterance and pause lengths and frequencies

Automatic analysis of the lengths and frequencies of utterance and pauses is highly desirable in the study of large amounts of speech produced by pathologic speakers and of interactive speech such as that between mother and child, clinician and client, and teacher and student. This paper describes a microcomputer-based analysis method of utterance and pause lengths and frequencies in connected speech. The instrumentation consists of a rectifier-smoother circuit, an analog-to-digital convertor and an Apple microcomputer. The printouts list utterances and pauses (in milliseconds) in the order of occurrence, and means and standard deviations of the utterances and pauses. The program and the results of reliability and validity tests of this method are described.