Mapping the time course of overt emotion dysregulation, self-injurious behavior, and aggression in psychiatrically hospitalized autistic youth: A naturalistic study.
Jessie B Northrup, Matthew S Goodwin, Christine B Peura and 4 others
PMID 35751466WHAT IT FOUND
In hospitalized autistic youth, self-injury and aggression often occurred during visible emotion dysregulation, but many episodes did not.
Self-injury and aggression did not usually follow one another, and patterns varied widely between young people.
Key findings
01Self-injury occurred during emotion dysregulation in 48.9% of SIB intervals on average, and aggression occurred during emotion dysregulation in 35.8% of aggression intervals on average.
02Self-injury and aggression were more likely to precede emotion dysregulation than to follow it, but about a third of participants did not show significant coordination.
03Self-injury and aggression did not occur together more often than expected by chance overall, though 27.6% of participants with both behaviors showed simultaneous coordination.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The sample was small and highly selected: 53 hospitalized autistic youth, mostly minimally verbal or nonverbal, primarily white and non-Hispanic, and with average non-verbal IQ in the Borderline range. Many participants had only one or two instances of some behaviors, so timing findings may be prone to random error. Behaviors were infrequent, and only participants with at least one observed behavior were included. Emotion dysregulation was measured only by outward observation, so internal distress may have been missed, particularly in minimally verbal or nonverbal participants. The setting was psychiatric inpatient care, where medication changes and staff responses may affect behavior. The study is observational, so it cannot show that emotion dysregulation caused self-injury or aggression, or that staff responses caused emotion dysregulation.
Declared interests
No conflict-of-interest declaration is included in the supplied text. Publication types list NIH extramural and non-U.S. government research support.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that emotion dysregulation causes self-injury or aggression in autistic youth. The study observed co-occurrence and timing patterns in hospitalized autistic youth, and many episodes of self-injury or aggression happened without visible emotion dysregulation.