Tell Me a Story: Socio-Emotional Functioning, Well-Being and Problematic Smartphone Use in Adolescents With Specific Learning Disabilities

Abstract

Although Specific Learning Disabilities (SLD) are described as specific difficulties in one or more academic areas, often socio-emotional problems are also reported to be related to well-being and school engagement. Moreover, recent evidence shows that emotional problems and reduced social support predict problematic use of new technologies, such as a smartphone, that can, in turn, increase these problems. In this study, we aimed to investigate socio-emotional functioning and its relation to well-being, school engagement, and problematic smartphone use. Social and emotional skills of 19 adolescents with a diagnosis of SLD and 19 control adolescents were assessed through a narrative test; adolescents were requested to narrate complete stories elicited by pictures representing social situations. Information on well-being and problematic smartphone use were collected through questionnaires. The comparison between groups showed differences in cognitive-social skills, although no significant differences in emotional functioning were found. Additionally, the perception of the social environment as supportive and trustworthy was related to general well-being for both groups, whereas the perception of limits and rules set by the adult world appeared to be related to a decreased investment in learning processes only for the SLD students. Finally, correlation analysis showed that smartphone use was associated with reduced perception of social support and to a decreased ability to understand and solve social situations. These results assert the critical role played by social information processing and social support in terms of well-being in adolescence, and contribute to enhancing knowledge of the mechanisms underlying problematic smartphone use in a clinical sample.

The Impact of School Climate on Well-Being Experience and School Engagement: A Study With High-School Students

“…This is in line with the evidence that high-school students with specific learning disabilities (SLD) can develop adaptive strategies to deal with the school requests and focus on functional level of learning (Fenzi and Cornoldi, 2015). Accordingly, a recent work on the students with SLD included in this sample, focused on the impact of low literacy skills on well-being experience (Sarti et al, 2019) did not found any significant difference between clinical and control groups. On the contrary, students with SLD showed an increasing sense of thriving related to a growing trust and perceived support from others.…”

The impact of problematic smartphone use on children's and adolescents’ quality of life: A systematic review

“…In most of the included studies ( k = 7, 77.8%), distribution of male and female participants was almost equal (50% ± 15%). One study, which compared two groups, had a higher amount of female participants (73.7%) in one of the groups, 32 while in another study the amount of male participants was 78.2% 33 . For an overview over the characteristics of included studies, see Table 1.…”

Sociomateriality in Children with Typical and/or Atypical Development

“…It should be stated, however, that extreme human-likeness can result in the known uncanny valley effect, according to which HRIs are negatively influenced by robots that are too similar to the human (Mori, 1970;MacDorman and Ishiguro, 2006;Mori et al, 2012). Thus, the HSRs' appearance represents an important social affordance for HRIs, as further demonstrated by the psychological research on racial and disability prejudice (Todd et al, 2011;Macdonald et al, 2017;Sarti et al, 2019;Manzi et al, 2020b). The anthropomorphic features of the HSRs can increase humans' perception of humanness, such as mind attribution and personality, and influence other psychological mechanisms and processes (Kiesler and Goetz, 2002;MacDorman et al, 2005;Powers and Kiesler, 2006;Bartneck et al, 2008;Broadbent et al, 2013;Złotowski et al, 2015;.…”