Multi-Informant Ratings of Childhood Limited Prosocial Emotions: Mother, Father, and Teacher Perspectives

ABSTRACT

Objective

Modest agreement between mothers’, fathers’, and teachers’ reports of child psychopathology can cause diagnostic ambiguity. Despite this, there is little research on informant perspectives of youth’s limited prosocial emotions (LPEs). We examined the relationship between mother-, father-, and teacher-reported LPE in a clinical sample of elementary school-aged children.

Method

The sample included 207 primarily Caucasian (n = 175, 84.5%) children (136 boys; 65.7%) aged 6–13 years (M = 8.35, SD = 2.04) referred to an outpatient child diagnostic clinic focused on externalizing problems. We report the percentage of youth meeting LPE criteria as a function of informant perspective(s). Utilizing standard scores, we report distributions of informant dyads in agreement/disagreement regarding child LPE, followed up by polynomial regressions to further interrogate the relationship between mother-, father-, and teacher-reported LPE as it relates to conduct problems (CPs).

Results

The prevalence of child LPE was approximately twice as large when compared to those reported in community samples; mothers and fathers generally agreed on their child’s LPE symptoms (55% agreement). Higher-order nonlinear interactions between mothers and fathers, as well as parents and teachers, emerged; discrepancies between informants, characterized by low levels of LPE reported by the child’s mother, were predictive of youth at the highest risk for CPs.

Conclusions

Our findings emphasize the clinical utility of gathering multiple reports of LPE when serious CPs are suspected. It may be beneficial for clinicians to give significant consideration to teacher reported LPE when interpreting multiple-informant reports of LPE.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethical Approval

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

Informed Consent

Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

Notes

¹ Models were re-run with covariates, which did not affect the strength nor direction of the results.

² Prior to our polynomial regression models, we first tested multicollinearity through the variance inflation factor; all variance inflation factors were <2.0, indicating the assumption of limited multicollinearity was not violated.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by T32 MH18268 (PJC).