Over the last 7 years Great Kids Place Founder & Director Michele Parkins MS, OTR, IMH-E® has been collecting data on the sensory-emotion-movement/action-personality connection based on information shared by hundreds of families that have been seen at Great Kids Place. In collaboration with other experts in the field, Michele Parkins and her research team have analyzed this data to ensure proven efficacy and validity of the Great Kids Place model. The work that is being done at Great Kid Place—guided by the Sensory-motor Emotional EngageMent Frame of Reference—is the culmination of this research.
As occupational therapists working within the sensory integration framework, we commonly experience families reporting challenges of emotion dysregulation, inattention, poor social skills, seeking behaviors, and negative emotional experiences (anxiety, frustration, anger, catastrophic emotions); consequently, these presenting challenges are often reported as leading to difficulties in family, school, and peer group participation and relational engagement.
We also see that children with these reported social emotional challenges have difficulty processing sensation and/or organizing and coordinating their actions. This can look like one or some of the following body based experiences:
- sensitive to or overwhelmed by sensations
- unaware of sensations in the environment or from their body (including objects and people)
- seeking input—such as touching or moving all the time
- muscle weakness and weak core strength
- poor endurance
- motor coordination difficulties
- difficulty listening to directions and following through with tasks to their completion.
Our research has determined that there is a direct relationship between these reported social, emotional, sensory and movement based challenges. We have coined the term for these correlations Sensory Emotional Personalities™.
The Sensory Emotional Engagement-Checklist (SEE-C), a scale used to understand the bi-directional implications of sensory motor challenges and social emotional capacities, is used to derive a child’s Sensory Emotional Personalities (SEPs). Research supports the reliability and validity of this scale. Reliability and Validity was determined by coorelating items on the SEE-C – representing social emotional observations of parent reports over 7 years with items on the Sensory Processing-3 Dimensional Checklists (SP3D-C), used to assess sensory integration and processing abilities and challenges.
The results yielded that sensory patterns were clearly linked the social emotional patterns represented on the checklist. The social emotional patterns further grouped into 5 distinct patterns of behavior. These five groupings were then named to summarize the characteristics that characteristics that were represented within them. These then became known as the Sensory Emotional Personalities™.
You can find a summary of this research below.
Research continues on the Sensory-motor Emotional EngageMent Frame of Reference, including further research on the use of the Sensory Emotional Engagement Checklist in various populations as well as research on the intervention model.