A study examining the relationship between alexithymia and challenging behaviour in adults with intellectual disability.
When carers say an adult with ID has trouble naming feelings, expect more frequent and harder-to-manage challenging behavior.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Austin et al. (2015) asked two questions. Can adults with intellectual disability say how well they understand their own feelings? And does that skill link to how often or how hard their challenging behavior is to manage?
Staff and clients each filled out a short alexithymia checklist. Carers also recorded how frequent, severe and hard-to-manage each person’s behavior was.
What they found
When staff rated an adult as very alexithymic, that adult also had more frequent, severe and harder-to-manage challenging behavior.
The adults’ own ratings did not show this link. Observer scores mattered; self-ratings did not.
How this fits with other research
Carr et al. (2002) looked at mood instead of alexithymia and saw no link to behavior in severe-profound ID. The new study used a wider range of ID levels and a different emotional trait, so the two findings sit side-by-side rather than clash.
Keintz et al. (2011) also found that low mood predicted more behavior problems. Together these papers tell a simple story: emotional variables staff can see—mood or alexithymia—flag risk, but the exact variable may differ by sample.
Jennett et al. (2003) meta-analysis already lists “communication deficits” as a top risk marker. Alexithymia is one face of that deficit, so Austin et al. (2015) give a finer-grained tool for the same risk.
Why it matters
If you support adults with ID, add a quick alexithymia checklist to your intake packet. A high staff score is a red flag for tougher behavior days ahead. Use it to boost staffing, pre-teach coping skills and write crisis plans before problem behavior spikes.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
BACKGROUND: Research suggesting that people with intellectual disabilities (ID) have difficulties in recognising emotions provides a rationale for studying alexithymia in this population. A number of studies have found a relationship between alexithymia and challenging behaviours in various populations and this study aims to discover if this is the case for people with ID. METHOD: Cross-sectional data were collected from 96 participants with ID and 95 of their carers. The service user participants completed an alexithymia questionnaire for children while carers completed the checklist for challenging behaviour and the observer alexithymia scale. Correlational analyses were employed to explore relationships between the variables. RESULTS: The relationship between service user and carer-rated alexithymia was very weak. The analysis did show significant associations between observer-rated alexithymia and challenging behaviour frequency, management difficulty and severity, but there was no significant relationship between challenging behaviour and alexithymia as rated by service users themselves. CONCLUSIONS: This study suggests that observer-rated alexithymia is important in understanding challenging behaviour presented by people with ID. Service user-rated alexithymia had no association with challenging behaviour, in contrast to the results from similar research with other challenging populations.
Journal of intellectual disability research : JIDR, 2015 · doi:10.1111/jir.12186