Determinants of negative emotional reactions and causal beliefs about self-injurious behaviour: an experimental study.
New staff feel more disgust and understand less about self-injury, especially when it looks severe—so teach function first, expose second.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team showed college students short videos of self-injury.
Some clips looked mild. Some looked severe.
After each clip the students rated how upset they felt and why they thought the person hurt themself.
None of the students had worked with people with disabilities before.
What they found
The novices felt stronger anger, fear, and disgust than seasoned staff usually report.
They also picked “the person wants attention” less often than experts do.
The most extreme reactions came after severe, attention-maintained self-injury.
In short, inexperience plus visible severity equals big emotions and shaky guesses.
How this fits with other research
Pitchford et al. (2019) show that today we see more automatically maintained self-injury and slightly weaker treatment effects.
That trend makes early staff training even more urgent, because new staff already misread function.
Davies et al. (2014) warn not to treat self-injury as a sign of depression in people with ID.
Hanley et al. (2003) adds a second warning: untrained viewers may also jump to wrong behavioral functions.
Together the papers say, “Don’t guess the why—assess it, and train staff before they face the behavior.”
Why it matters
If you supervise new RBTs or teachers, show them this study.
Let them watch mild and severe examples while you model neutral, data-based talk.
Teach them to scan for function, not drama.
A one-hour prep session can cut the shock value of severe self-injury and keep treatment decisions rational.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
BACKGROUND: Caregivers' emotional and cognitive reactions to challenging behaviours have been identified as potential determinants of their reinforcing responses towards such behaviours. However, few studies have explored factors affecting caregivers' emotional and cognitive responses to challenging behaviours. METHODS: Sixty students inexperienced in work with people with challenging behaviours and 60 experienced staff watched one of two carefully matched, acted videotapes depicting self-injury maintained by attention or escape-from-task demands. The participants were also told whether the self-injury depicted typically led to mild or severe consequences for the person filmed. The subjects completed measures of their negative emotional reactions to the self-injury and their behavioural causal beliefs about the behaviour depicted. RESULTS: Analyses of variance revealed that students reported more negative emotional reactions and were less likely to endorse behavioural causal hypotheses. Those who watched the severe self-injury videotape also reported more negative emotional reactions. Two effects of the behavioural function of the depicted self-injury were also found: (1) attention-maintained self-injury was associated with higher levels of endorsement of behavioural causal hypotheses; and (2) severe attention-maintained self-injury led to the strongest negative emotional reactions, but only from students. CONCLUSIONS: The effects of experience and behavioural function on emotional reactions and behavioural causal beliefs need to be explored in more detail in future research. If replicated, the present results have significant implications for theory and practice in the remediation of challenging behaviours and the support of care staff.
Journal of intellectual disability research : JIDR, 2003 · doi:10.1046/j.1365-2788.2003.t01-1-00456.x