Modern Approaches to the Diagnosis of Developmental Disorders in the New Issue of “Clinical Psychology and Special Education”

The third issue of the "Clinical Psychology and Special Education" journal for 2023 has been published and is awaiting interested readers. 

The issue opens with a section of theoretical research, in which the authors – M.A. Gracheva and S. Shalilekh present a review of publications on the topic of dyslexia diagnosis using artificial intelligence methods based on eye movement data. The authors discuss the quality of diagnostics which the researchers managed to achieve, on what groups of subjects, for what languages and with what types of algorithms. The presented results allow us to assess the great prospects of AI diagnostics in the detection of reading disorders.

Here you can also become acquainted with the analysis of the history of development and modern research of the alliance in psychotherapy and counselling, presented by G.V Oreshina and M.A. Zhukova. The article gives a historical overview of the concept of the alliance, considers the most frequently used methods and techniques of its assessment. The authors argue the need for multilevel, interdisciplinary research to form a modern model of alliance.

In the section of empirical research, A.N. Alekhin and S.I. Belyaeva share the results of their research into the peculiarities of thinking of modern preschool children with intellectual disability. Based on the analysis of dissertation works on the study of children's thinking carried out in the "pre-digital" era, the authors conducted their own empirical research that accurately recreated the methodology of those experiments. A number of important differences during the course of task performance by modern preschoolers and their peers of previous years were established.

In the same section there is an article by I.D. Antonova and I.A. Kostin devoted to the study of the peculiarities of school adaptation of students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in the first year of schooling. The authors present the results of the initial stage of the longitudinal study, describe in detail the questionnaires adapted for the needs of the study, as well as the system of evaluation of the obtained data, and discuss the influence of a number of factors on the school adaptation of children with ASD.

The article by M.A. Odintsova et al. presents the experience of studying individual-psychological and family resources of mothers raising children with disabilities. The authors identify three subgroups of mothers on the basis of profiles: "resourceful", "moderately resourceful", "insufficiently resourceful"; they show the specific features of each profile and the possibilities of applying the obtained data in practice.

Relations with their mother and peers in preadolescent children with diabetes are studied in the work of R.A. Sabitova and M.V. Bulygina. The results of the study suggest that control, demandingness, guardianship on the part of the mother can act as a way of coping with the situation of the child's illness. The article discusses a number of features of interaction with peers of children with type 1 diabetes, which are compared with the characteristics of their relationships with their mothers. 

The article by A.M. Fedoseeva and N.V. Babkina shows the results of the study of the features of personal distress of teachers of special and inclusive education. The obtained results make it possible to observe that personal distress is significantly higher in teachers working in inclusive education. At the same time, no differences were found between the groups of teachers in terms of psychological well-being. The authors note that emotional exhaustion, empathic care, self-acceptance and autonomy were found to be significant predictors of personal distress among teachers with different experiences of working with students with intellectual disability.

The section "Methods and techniques" opens with an article by N.V. Kopteva et al., devoted to psychometric testing of the revised version of the "Disembodiment on the Internet" questionnaire. For more accurate diagnostics of the technological disembodiment of the user as a variant of alienation of one’s own physical body the authors have changed and expanded the points base of the technique, checked the reliability and validity of the questionnaire during the course of psychodiagnostic examination.

Here the authors L.N. Molchanova and A.V. Buzovkina present a conceptual model for the study of the features of coordination functions in hearing-impaired children of primary school age. The authors note the lack of formation of coordination functions and a decrease in their dynamic characteristics such as pace and accuracy, which indicates the insufficiency of these levels of movement organization in primary school children with sensorineural hearing loss compared to children without hearing loss.

The issue concludes with the "Applied Research" section, in which the authors S.V. Alekhina and A.Yu. Shemanov share the results of parents' assessment of the inclusive educational environment of schools and their participation in its creation. The article discusses the data of monitoring conducted in 10 regions of Russia, and attempts to determine, on the one hand, the parents' opinion about the readiness of schools for inclusive education according to a number of indicators of the inclusive educational environment, and on the other hand - to assess the activeness of their participation in various forms of work offered by schools.

Have a useful and entertaining read!