Assessment of distress in young children: A comparison of autistic disorder, developmental delay, and typical development

Abstract

Distress emotions in very young children are manifest in vocal, facial, and bodily cues. Moreover, children with different developmental conditions (i.e. Autistic Disorder- AD, Developmental Delay- DD, Typically Developing- TD) appear to manifest their distress emotions via different channels. To decompose channel of emotional distress display by group, we conducted a study in which video clips of crying of 18 children 18 months of age belonging to three groups (AD, DD, TD) were modified to isolate vocal, facial, or bodily cues, and 42 female adults were asked to judge the distress and typicality (expected normality) of the different stimuli. We find variation in adult judgements of distress and typicality by child group (AD, DD, TD) and by isolated cues (vocal, facial, or body). Although there is some overlap between responses to episodes of crying of children with AD and those with DD, the different cues of crying of children with AD tend to be considered more atypical and distressed than those of the other two groups (DD and TD). Early assessment of different cues of the expression of distress, and more generally of emotional expressivity in a child, may provide useful information for pediatricians and practitioners who are in contact with young children and must make clinical screening decisions. The findings also alert parents of children with AD to important aspects of their cries.

Physiological and self-report responses of parents of children with autism spectrum disorder to children crying

“…This is an expected result, as children with ASD express atypical patterns of distress vocalization, such as higher f0 (Esposito et al, , 2011Esposito, Nakazawa, et al, 2013;Esposito & Venuti, 2009a, 2010aOller et al, 2010;Sheinkopf et al, 2012). Moreover, these results are in line with those of previous studies which indicate that adults felt mainly uneasiness and negative states while listening to ASD crying episodes and felt more positive mental states while listening to crying episodes of TD children (Esposito & Venuti, 2008, 2009a, 2009bVenuti et al, 2012).…”

“…The signs and symptoms of ASD vary widely, especially the child's social communication development which is important for spotting early signs of ASD. Recently, there has been an increasing interest in vocal development of children with ASD and typically developing (TD) children, in particular crying (Esposito, Nakazawa, Venuti, & Bornstein, 2013;Esposito, Venuti, & Bornstein, 2011;Esposito & Venuti, 2009b, 2010bFort & Manfredi, 1998;LaGasse, Neal, & Lester, 2005;Manfredi, Bocchi, Orlandi, Spaccaterra, & Donzelli, 2009;Oller et al, 2010;Orlandi, Manfredi, Bocchi, & Scattoni, 2012;Reyes-Galaviz, Cano-Ortiz, & Reyes-García, 2008;Sheinkopf, Iverson, Rinaldi, & Lester, 2012;Venuti et al, 2012). Several studies reported that children with ASD express atypical patterns of distress vocalization such as higher fundamental frequency (f0),…”

“…shorter inter-bout pauses, fewer utterances (Esposito, Nakazawa, Venuti, & Bornstein, 2012;Esposito et al, 2011;Esposito, Nakazawa, et al, 2013;Esposito & Venuti, 2009a, 2010aOller et al, 2010;Sheinkopf et al, 2012). Mostly, the literature in this field focused on crying of infants (such as 1-year old or new-borns).…”

“…Frequencies outside the 200Hz to 1200Hz were filtered out to remove frequencies that are outside of the cry range and due to noise (Abou-Abbas, Tadj, & Fersaie, 2017;Esposito et al, 2015Esposito et al, , 2011Sheinkopf et al, 2012). The First Spectral Peak (FSP) was obtained by identifying the value of the first amplitude peak of the LTAS output.…”

Three physiological responses in fathers and non-fathers’ to vocalizations of typically developing infants and infants with Autism Spectrum Disorder

“…Deviations in infants’ communicative signals and/or misunderstanding their messages can compromise infant care, parental effectiveness, and the budding parent-infant relationship (Adachi et al, 1985; LaGasse et al, 2005), as seems sometimes the case in parent-infant interaction in early autism (Esposito & Venuti, 2008). Results from different research groups (Bieberich & Morgan, 1998; Esposito & Venuti, 2009, 2010; Esposito et al, 2011, 2012, 2013; Oller et al, 2010; Sheinkopf et al, 2000, 2012) have shown that children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), even before they receive a diagnosis, express atypical patterns of cry (higher fundamental frequency, shorter inter-bout pauses, fewer utterances) in response to social (Esposito et al, 2014b) and non-social stressors (Sheinkopf et al, 2012). A number of studies of women (mothers and non-mothers) have also revealed how episodes of crying in children with ASD are perceived as unexpected (Esposito and Venuti, 2008) and more ‘negative’ than those of typically developing children (Venuti et al, 2012).…”