Communication Continued: Well-being and Emotional Competence (Dutch)

In this talk, Helena Wandin discusses the importance of well-being and emotional competence.  

Two recent studies highlight the importance of addressing psychological well-being for individuals with Rett syndrome (Bisgaard et al., 2021; Buchanan et al., 2022). Approaches to optimize psychological well-being include medical treatment, behaviour activation and supporting emotional competence, the latter being the scope of this presentation.  

Emotional competence includes a) being aware of one’s own and others’ emotional state, b) labelling emotions, c) being able to talk about the reason for the emotion and how to manage emotions, and d) understanding that other people have emotional experiences that are different from one’s own. All these skills develop through interaction about one’s own and other’s emotional experiences.  

STEPS, Strategies for talking about emotions as partners is a program to support communication partners to talk about emotions that was developed by Na & Wilkinson (2018) and evaluated by Rangel Rodriguez et al. (2021).  

Communication partners are encouraged to provide and model labels for a variety of emotions, validate and discuss emotions and communicate about appropriate responses to emotions. The authors suggest doing this during story book reading. The evaluations of STEPS showed that both parents and children talked more about emotions after the interventions. Early Development of Emotional Competence (EDEC) is a structured interview that can be used for planning an intervention and EDEC-P is a template for sharing information from the interview (Wilkinson et al., 2021).  

• Bisgaard, A. M., Wong, K., Højfeldt, A. K., Larsen, J. L., Schönewolf‐Greulich, B., Rønde, G., Downs, J., & Stahlhut, M. (2021). Decline in gross motor skills in adult Rett syndrome; results from a Danish longitudinal study. American Journal of Medical Genetics Part A, 185(12), 3683-3693.  
• Buchanan, C. B., Stallworth, J. L., Joy, A. E., Dixon, R. E., Scott, A. E., Beisang, A. A., Benke, T. A., Glaze, D. G., Haas, R. H., & Heydemann, P. T. (2022). Anxiety-like behavior and anxiolytic treatment in the Rett syndrome natural history study. Journal of neurodevelopmental disorders, 14(1), 1-11.  
• Na, J. Y., & Wilkinson, K. M. (2018). Communication about emotions during storybook reading: Effects of an instruction programme for children with Down syndrome. International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 20(7), 745-755.  
• Wilkinson, K., Na, J. Y., Rangel Rodríguez, G., & Sowers, D. (2021). Fostering Communication about Emotions. In B. T. Ogletree (Ed.), Aided Augmentative and Alternative Communication Challenges and Solutions (pp. 313-338).