The role of self-injury in the organisation of behaviour.
Self-injury works like a traffic controller that increases the variety and timing of nearby behavior in adults with ID.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Researchers watched 32 adults with intellectual disability for long stretches. They used t-pattern software to find hidden time patterns in self-injury and nearby behaviors.
Each person was filmed during normal day activities. The computer hunted for chains where self-injury came just before or after other actions.
What they found
Self-injury did not sit alone. It kicked off more varied behavior right after the bout and also minutes later.
The more often someone hit or bit themselves, the richer the surrounding 'behavior web' became. Moves multiplied and formed new sequences.
How this fits with other research
Van Houten et al. (1980) warned that SIB definitions carry extra meaning and urged us to look at daily ecology. Storch et al. (2012) now give a tool—t-pattern—to map that ecology minute-by-minute.
Petrovic et al. (2016) show toddlers who self-injure often signal pain. Their pain lens adds a 'why' to the 'how' patterns revealed here.
Garcia et al. (1999) found smaller social-skills repertoires in adults with SIB. The new data hint that self-injury itself may fill the gap by creating fresh behavioral chains.
Why it matters
You can run t-pattern on your own dense video. Spot when self-injury acts like a starter gun for new behavior cycles. Use those chains to pick precise replacement responses and to see if your intervention is simplifying or merely shifting the pattern.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
BACKGROUND: Self-injuring acts are among the most dramatic behaviours exhibited by human beings. There is no known single cause and there is no universally agreed upon treatment. Sophisticated sequential and temporal analysis of behaviour has provided alternative descriptions of self-injury that provide new insights into its initiation and maintenance. METHOD: Forty hours of observations for each of 32 participants were collected in a contiguous 2-week period. Twenty categories of behavioural and environmental events were recorded electronically that captured the precise time each observation occurred. Temporal behavioural/environmental patterns associated with self-injurious events were revealed with a method (t-patterns; THEME) for detecting non-linear, real-time patterns. RESULTS: Results indicated that acts of self-injury contributed both to more patterns and to more complex patterns. Moreover, self-injury left its imprint on the organisation of behaviour even when counts of self-injury were expelled from the continuous record. CONCLUSIONS: Behaviour of participants was organised in a more diverse array of patterns when self-injurious behaviour was present. Self-injuring acts may function as singular points, increasing coherence within self-organising patterns of behaviour.
Journal of intellectual disability research : JIDR, 2012 · doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000314