SENSORY INTEGRATION (PART 2)

Sensory integration refers to how people use the information provided by all sensations originating within the body or from the external environment.

Sensory Responsiveness: What’s normal and what isn’t?

Kids with sensory dysfunction have much more trouble with sensory processing. It includes the following symptoms:

  • They usually manage many of the following behavioral symptoms, which can interfere with the daily activities and learning.
  • Oversensitivity or under-sensitivity to touch, sights, sounds, movements, tastes, and smells.
  • High distractibility with problems paying attention and staying focused on a task.
  • An unusually high or low activity level.
  • Frequent turning out or withdrawing.
  • Intense, out of proportion reactions to challenging situations and unfamiliar environments.
  • Impulsiveness, with little or no self-control.
  • Difficulty transitioning from activity to activator situation to situation.
  • Rigidity and inflexibility at times.
  • Clumsiness and carelessness.
  • Discomfort in group situations.
  • Social or emotional difficulties.
  • Developmental and learning delays and acting silly or immature
  • Awkwardness, insecurity, or feeling “stupid or weird.”
  • Trouble handling frustration, a tendency to tantrum longer and more intensely than other children and more difficulty returning to a calm state.
  • Problems transitioning from an alert, active state to a calm rested state.

TREATMENT

 

  • Sensory activities can be facilitating, inhibiting or regulatory/ modulating, depending on the quality, intensity, and duration of the stimuli.
  • The therapist provides light touch, textures, shapes or deep touch pressure.

Intervention related to sensory discrimination

  • Many of the techniques used for intervention in modulation also apply in discrimination.
  • To help a child develop appropriate tactile discrimination, the child may discriminate size, shape, texture, location, and quality of a verity of tactile stimuli to various areas of the body with and without vision.

 

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