Who Should Report Abnormal Behavior at Preschool Age? The Case of Behavioral Inhibition

Abstract

Children who are behaviorally "inhibited"-a condition at the extreme of the behavioral inhibition dimension-experience distress in uncertain social situations. Although parents and teachers are in the best position to detect this condition, they rarely agree. This study aims to analyze the agreement between parents and teachers and to examine the relations between ratings made by parents and teachers and assessments made by clinicians and researchers. Parents, teachers and clinicians rated the behavioral inhibition of 365 preschoolers. Seventy-three randomly selected participants were observed using an adaptation of the Behavioral Inhibition Paradigm. Parent-teacher correlations on 34 items and different clusters were, on average, r = .3. The degree of convergence between observational measures and ratings by parents and teachers was moderate-low and did not improve when considering only subsamples from the ends of the distributions. Discriminant analysis suggests that both parents and teachers tend to have a moderate-low ability to detect "inhibited" children.

Understanding children with Behavioral Inhibition

“…It has been argued that BI children may find extremely difficult to meet academic demands, for example, those related to verbal participation. All this may compound a child's emotional distress, appearing as symptoms of anxiety and depression, where we find somatization or somatic complaints which children may exhibit in the classroom (Ballespí et al, 2012). In addition, in contrast with the findings in the family context, teachers did not score lower social and adaptive skills.…”

Beyond diagnosis: Mentalization and mental health from a transdiagnostic point of view in adolescents from non-clinical population

“…Thus, we introduced the scores in the second order scales of CBCL (parents) and TRF (teachers) in a principal components analysis and we used the standardized factor scores of the one-factor solution as a single but multi-informed index of total (70% of explained variance; weights=0.84; a=0.58), internalizing (67% of explained variance; weights=0.80; a=0.44), and externalizing problems (64% of explained variance; weights=0.82; a=0.50). The psychometric properties of these indexes are considered good enough because they combine information from complementary (i.e., usually discrepant; Ballespí et al, 2012) informants.…”

Comparison of behaviorally inhibited and typically developing children’s play behaviors in the preschool classroom

“…When laboratory observations are not used, researchers employ a variety of parent- and teacher-report measures to capture BI and conceptually similar constructs in young children (e.g., shyness, social withdrawal, social anxiety), such as the Behavioral Inhibition Questionnaire ( Bishop et al, 2003 ), the Preschool Anxiety Scale ( Spence et al, 2001 ), and the Colorado Child Temperament Inventory ( Rowe and Plomin, 1977 ). However, researchers have noted discrepancies between parent and teacher ratings of BI children, such that both parent and teacher ratings only moderately converge with observational ratings of children’s behavior in the laboratory ( Ballespí et al, 2012 ), thus highlighting the importance of multi-informant and multi-modal measurement. Moreover, given the pivotal role that positive and negative peer interactions play in the aforementioned developmental cascade model toward child social outcomes ( Rubin et al, 2009 ; Rubin and Chronis-Tuscano, 2021 ), it is imperative to not only observe inhibited children’s reactions in the face of novelty, but also within the peer/social contexts in which their social difficulties may actually ensue.…”