Final PhD Oral Dissertation Defence
ELLEN SHUMKA
(School and Applied Child Psychology)
Monday, September 30th, 2019, 12:30 pm
Room #203, Thea Koerner House, UBC Graduate Student Centre, 6371 Crescent Road
Title: Multimethod Assessment of Social-Emotional Competence in Children with Selective Mutism
Chair: Dr. Grant Charles (SOWK)
Supervisor: Dr. Shelley Hymel (HDLC)
Supervisory Committee: Dr. Rosalind Catchpole (PSYT) and Dr. Sterett Mercer (SPED)
University Examiners: Dr. Pat Mirenda (SPED) and Dr. Eva Oberle (SPPH)
External Examiner: Dr. Jodene Fine (Michigan State University)
Abstract:
Selective mutism (SM) is a rare childhood anxiety disorder associated with significant psychosocial impairment. Despite the understanding that social-emotional functioning is essential to mental health and well-being, few studies to date have examined the social-emotional competencies of children with SM. The current study documents the social lives of 31 children with SM through a multi-method assessment procedure. Specifically, the social-emotional competence of children with SM was assessed using (1) parent reports obtained in semistructured interviews, (2) parent and teacher reports of social skills using established rating scales, and (3) multiple, direct measures of emotion recognition abilities using standardized norm-referenced assessments. This is one of the most extensive studies of the social-emotional competence in children with SM to date, and thus, contributes greatly to our understanding of this disorder.
Results from the current study indicated that children with SM have problems in various areas of social-emotional competence that extend beyond our previous understanding of the disorder. Consistent with previous research, parents and teachers in the current study reported that children with SM have “Below Average” social skills. A unique contribution of the present study is the finding that children with SM made more errors labelling the emotions depicted on child and adult faces compared to the normative sample, and tended to make the most errors on angry faces compared to happy faces on child and adult facial stimuli. Further, results from correlational analyses revealed that parent, but not teacher, ratings of poorer social skills were related to more emotion recognition errors, which is the first study to document a relationship between errors at various stages of social-information processing (i.e., encoding/interpreting facial stimuli and social skill problems).