Date of Award

2017

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts in Psychology

Department

Psychology

First Advisor

Yaroslavsky, Ilya

Subject Headings

Clinical Psychology. Families and Family Life

Abstract

Typically developing (TD) siblings of children with an Intellectual or Developmental Disability (IDD) are among those most influenced by their sibling’s diagnosis. Factors such as increased family stress, lack of family communication, and negative sibling perception can play a role in leading to internalizing and externalizing problems from the TD child. A limit to the existing sibling relationship literature is that the relationships in families with a child with IDD have only been collected via self-report measures through which respondents have been found to fake their responses to avoid being perceived in certain ways. Conversely, implicit measures, such as the implicit association task (IAT) have been shown to uncover what a person may be feeling without a person having to explicitly report those feelings. This study aimed to bridge this gap in the extant literature by pairing self-report measures with an IAT by examining the association between typically developing youths’ relationships with their IDD sibling and the TD youths’ psychological adjustment. However, due to lack of sample size these relationships were unable to be examined. Instead, this study explored the links between family stress and the role of parental communication about the IDD sibling’s disabilities and how those related to TD child adjustment and TD child perception of their IDD sibling.

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