The relationship among attributions, emotions, and interpersonal styles of staff working with clients with intellectual disabilities and challenging behavior.
Blaming the client predicts cold, controlling staff style, but the path runs around emotions, not through them—train staff to re-frame cause, not just to calm down.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team asked support staff how they think and feel about clients who show severe behavior.
They used a paper survey. Staff rated what causes the behavior and how they react inside.
The goal was to see if blaming the client leads to bad feelings, and if those feelings shape how staff treat the client.
What they found
Staff who said "the client does it on purpose" also reported more anger and less warmth.
Yet the emotions did not carry the blame into action. Attributions linked straight to style, skipping the mood middle step.
In short, thoughts drive style; feelings ride along but do not steer.
How this fits with other research
Lambrechts et al. (2009) saw the same blame-emotion link, but they also found the chain breaks when you watch real shifts in staff behavior. The new data confirm the break.
Eisenhower et al. (2006) already showed emotion did not predict willingness to help. Griffith et al. (2012) echo that null result, so the pattern holds across years.
Koegel et al. (2014) looked at mothers, not staff. For moms, blaming the child did lower warmth. The difference warns us: parent attributions work differently than paid carer attributions.
Why it matters
Stop hoping a pep-talk that calms feelings will fix staff style. Go after the thought first. Add brief attribution re-frame moments to your in-service: "Client behavior is communication, not defiance." Track if staff then use more praise and less command. One slide, one role-play, one week of data—start Monday.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Several studies have tested Weiner's model, which suggests a relationship among causal attributions regarding challenging behavior (CB), emotions, and helping behavior of staff. No studies have focused on interpersonal styles. The goals of this study were to investigate the influence of type of CB on attributions, emotions and interpersonal style of staff, the relationships among staff attributions, emotions, and interpersonal style, and the mediating function of emotions in the relation between attributions and interpersonal style. Participants were 99 staff members. CB aimed at the environment was related to higher levels of negative emotions, attributions and certain interpersonal styles such as controlling behavior. In addition, a relationship between emotions, attributions, and interpersonal style was found. However, there was no mediating function of emotions in the relationships between attributions and interpersonal style. Future research should take a more dynamic view of staff behavior and staff-client interaction into account.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2012 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2012.03.022