Lampi Andrew J, Jaswal Vikram K, Evans Tanya M
Department of Psychology, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, United States.
Center for Advanced Study of Teaching and Learning, School of Education and Human Development, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, United States.
Front Psychol. 2021 Jan 8;11:588001. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.588001. eCollection 2020.
Alexithymia is a subclinical trait involving difficulty describing and identifying emotions. It is common in a number of psychiatric conditions. Alexithymia in children is sometimes measured by parent report and sometimes by child self-report, but it is not yet known how closely related the two measures are. This is an important question both theoretically and practically, in terms of research design and clinical practice. We conducted a preliminary study to investigate this question in a sample of 6- to 11-year-old neurotypical children and their parents ( = 29 dyads). Parent and child reports were not correlated, and 93% of parents under-estimated their child's level of alexithymia relative to the child's self-report. Based on these results, we hypothesize that when asked to report on the child's alexithymia, children and parents may not be reporting on the same phenomenon, and thus these two measures may not be interchangeable. These provocative findings, however, must be considered preliminary: our analyses were sufficiently powered to detect a strong relation between the two types of report had one existed, but our analyses were not sufficiently powered to distinguish between a small relation and no relation at all.
述情障碍是一种亚临床特质，表现为描述和识别情感存在困难。它在多种精神疾病中较为常见。儿童的述情障碍有时通过家长报告来衡量，有时通过儿童自我报告来衡量，但这两种测量方法的关联程度尚不清楚。从研究设计和临床实践的角度来看，这在理论和实践上都是一个重要问题。我们进行了一项初步研究，以6至11岁发育正常的儿童及其父母（共29对）为样本调查这个问题。家长报告和儿童报告不相关，相对于儿童自我报告，93%的家长低估了孩子的述情障碍水平。基于这些结果，我们推测，当被要求报告孩子的述情障碍时，孩子和家长可能报告的不是同一现象，因此这两种测量方法可能不可互换。然而，这些引人深思的发现必须被视为初步结果：我们的分析有足够的效力来检测这两种报告类型之间若存在的强关联，但没有足够的效力来区分微弱关联和完全没有关联。
