The role of self‐injury in the organisation of behaviour

Abstract

Background Self-injuring acts are among the most dramatic behaviours exhibited by human beings. There is no known single cause and there is no universally agreed upon treatment. Sophisticated sequential and temporal analysis of behaviour has provided alternative descriptions of self-injury that provide new insights into its initiation and maintenance. Method Forty hours of observations for each of 32 participants were collected in a contiguous two-week period. Twenty categories of behavioural and environmental events were recorded electronically that captured the precise time each observation occurred. Temporal behavioural/environmental patterns associated with self-injurious events were revealed with a method (t-patterns; THEME) for detecting non-linear, real-time patterns. Results Results indicated that acts of self-injury contributed both to more patterns and to more complex patterns. Moreover, self-injury left its imprint on the organization of behaviour even when counts of self-injury were expelled from the continuous record. Conclusions Behaviour of participants was organized in a more diverse array of patterns with SIB was present. Self-injuring acts may function as singular points, increasing coherence within self-organizing patterns of behaviour.

Risk Factors for Self-Injury, Aggression, and Stereotyped Behavior Among Young Children At Risk for Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities

“…Future studies might investigate how SIB, stereotyped behavior, and aggression are linked to development in young children at risk for IDD, with a view to prevention. As Sandman, Kemp, Mabini, Pincus, and Magnusson (2012) have noted, the best predictor of SIB in adults is past performance of SIB. The same may be true for SBDs in young children with IDD.…”

Stereotyped behaviours as precursors of self‐injurious behaviours: a longitudinal study with infants and toddlers at risk for developmental delay

“…Sandman et al . (), using T‐pattern analysis, and Kroeker et al (), using lag sequential analysis, found that SIB was best predicted by its own recent history of SIB rather than by social and environmental contingencies. They labelled this type of SIB ‘Contagious SIB.’ A similar result was found in the present study, where both early SIB strongly related to later SIB and early stereotyped behaviour strongly related to later stereotyped behaviour.…”

Quantifying the offensive sequences that result in goals in elite futsal matches

“…As stated by Magnusson (2000, p. 94), "that is, if A is an earlier and B a later component of the same recurring temporal pattern then after an occurrence of A at t, there is an interval [t+d1, t +d2] (d2≥d1≥d0) that tends to contain at least one occurrence of B more often than would be expected by chance". This software has been extensively used in several areas of knowledge both in animal (Feenders & Bateson, 2012;Nicol, Segonds-Pichon, & Magnusson, 2015) and human studies (Sandman, Kemp, Mabini, Pincus, & Magnusson, 2012;Woods, Yefimova, & Brecht, 2014).…”