Poster #12 - Associations between Marital Conflict and Autistic Children’s Internalizing Behaviors: The Mediating Role of Sleep Quality

• In Event: Poster Session 11

Abstract

Introduction: Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder that impairs social communication and causes restricted and repetitive behaviors, interests, and activities (APA, 2013). Autistic children also have a variety of co-occurring difficulties, including elevated levels of internalizing behaviors (Neuhaus and Bernier, 2013) and trouble sleeping (Mannion et al., 2013). Research with neurotypical children highlights the importance of considering the family environment when examining predictors of child outcomes (El-Sheikh et al., 2019). Specifically, the quality of the interparental relationship has been found to be a robust predictor of child sleep quality and child internalizing behaviors (Lemola et al., 2011). However, little research has examined the links between the quality of interparental relationships, autistic children’s sleep quality, and their internalizing symptoms. The current study examined the extent to which the quality of the interparental relationship predicts autistic children’s internalizing behaviors via child sleep quality.
Method: Participants included 115 verbally fluent autistic children between the ages of 10 and 17 without a co-occurring intellectual disability. Child participants and their parents attended an in-person lab visit. During the visit, the autistic child completed the following measures:
● Children’s Perception of Interparental Conflict (Grych et al., 1992): This 48-item measure evaluates children’s ratings of the frequency and intensity of interparental conflict.
● Cleveland Adolescent Sleepiness Questionnaire (Spilsbury et al., 2007): Contains 16 items measuring children’s daytime sleepiness.
● Child Depression Inventory (CDI; Kovaks, 1978):This 27-item measure evaluates child depressive symptoms.
● Screening for Child Anxiety Related Emotional Disorders (SCARED; Birmaher et al., 1999): This 41-item measure assesses children’s levels of anxiety symptoms.
Results: A mediation model was performed using PROCESS (Hayes, 2018) in SPSS to determine whether sleepiness mediated the relationship between children’s ratings of interparental conflict and child internalizing symptoms (composite of CDI and SCARED). Analyses were performed while controlling for child gender, child IQ, and whether the child was attending school or on summer break. Results revealed that interparental conflict positively predicted sleepiness (a path), b = .36, SE = .15, p = .02. In turn, sleepiness positively predicted internalizing symptoms (b path), b = .03, SE < .01, p ≤ .001. While interparental conflict did also positively predict internalizing symptoms (c path) b = .03, SE = .01, p = .002, the 95% confidence interval of the indirect effect using 5,000 bootstrap reiterations did not include zero [.0009, .0247], suggesting a significant indirect effect of interparental conflict on internalizing symptoms via daytime sleepiness.

Discussion: Daytime sleepiness served as a mediator between interparental conflict and autistic children’s internalizing symptoms. Decreasing conflict between parents of autistic children is important because this conflict indirectly contributes to their internalizing symptoms. Thus, finding ways to improve autistic children’s sleep is critical, because their quality of sleep also contributes to their internalizing symptoms. Therefore, future research should focus on creating interventions for decreasing conflict in parents of autistic children and improving sleep quality and duration in autistic children.

Authors

• Kate Lindig
  Presenting Author

• Roxanne Lynne Odiorne, Texas Christian University

• Sarah Madison, Texas Christian University

• Chrystyna D Kouros, Southern Methodist University

• Naomi Ekas, Texas Christian University