Influence of Emotional state in Generalizing the learned skills.

Introduction:

'Why is she not able to generalize her learned skills in the therapy into unstructured settings?' This is the common question and frustration that every SLP goes through in his professional life. At one point you might question yourself, 'Am I not a good therapist?'  Even the parents feel frustrated why is her daughter not progressing!  There will be several reasons to not able to generalize her learned skills. To list a few important factors,  age, intellectual level, quantity and quality of opportunity to practice, and the emotional state of the student. We all consider first three factors in the therapy. However, there are only few SLPs consider the influence of emotional state! 

Influence:

The best practice in the research is to observe, analyze and test our own behavior!  After analyzing my own accent in different situations, I realized that when I am in a emotionally charged state (extremes of happy to mad, and tired) my accent kicks in! I remembered a story that I read when I was a child.  It is a story of one of the great kings who ruled almost all the parts of south India! He is famous with his eight wise men in his ministry! One day one person came to his chamber claiming that he is a polyglot, and challenged his kingdom to find his primary language! Amazingly he spoke all the languages as if they were all his primary languages! The king looked at his wise men and one of them stood up and said 'it is not a big deal, I can tell which one is your primary language. However, I need a day to figure it out!' The polyglot agreed and the king gave him a place to stay for the night. In the night the wise man came there with the mask and scared him with the sword! He shouted for help! Next day in the chamber, wiseman told him which one is his primary language! The polyglot was surprised and asked him how did he find it out. Any guess? Yes you are right, in the extreme scared emotion the polyglot shouted in his primary language for help! 

How can we overcome emotional state factor?

Let us discuss this in terms of different disorders. Articulation, voice, fluency and even language  skills generalization influenced by the emotional state of the student. 

Articulation therapy: 'since eight years I am using w/r sounds and you want me to change that in one year?' This is the statement made by one of the fourth grader in my therapy session when i was working on his generalization! It shocked me and I felt that he is right. We expect them to change their established behavior in a short period! My approach in articulation therapy is always working with the complex skills and touch base the simple skills! The philosophy behind this is, working on complex skills will influence the simple skills! The complex skill in generalization is using the learned skills in different emotional states! Hence, I changed my style of working with him! I gave him different emotional situations and asked him to use the target words with that emotions. Surprisingly it worked and within couple of months he was able to use target sounds. He was exited from speech therapy and spending his majority of time in the academics!

Using this experience I formulated a therapy approach and using it in my regular therapy sessions as well as in RTI program! This approach has the following components: showing the  placement and manner of articulation using adaptive procedures depending on the target sound, at least 150 practices in a session, using complex structures (three sound clusters, two sound clusters with distant articulation placement and or manner of target sounds),  multi tasking (graphomotor, visuomotor, and gross motor) and using emotional situations in all the stages of articulation therapy! I will write separate article on this approach.

Voice therapy: emotional state plays a vital role in the voice therapy!  To be contnd ....