5.5: Characteristics of Students with Emotional and Behavioral Disorders

Students with emotional and behavioral disorders exhibit a wide range of characteristics. This has important implications for educators and clinicians, who must be aware of characteristics that typically go unnoticed, such as social withdrawal. Most of these characteristics fall into the following categories.

Externalizing Characteristics

Externalizing characteristics of emotional and behavioral disorders are those that can be observed and that directly affect others. For example, individuals may exhibit irritable mood, aggression, defiance, destruction of property, deceitfulness, and vindictiveness.

Internalizing Characteristics

Internalizing characteristics of emotional and behavioral disorders are often not directly observable or do not directly affect others. For example, anxiety and social withdrawal are not always visible to external observers. In addition, students with obsessive–compulsive disorders may experience recurrent unwanted thoughts and repetitive behaviors (e.g., hair pulling).

Intellectual Characteristics

The IDEA definition of emotional disturbance includes “an inability to learn that cannot be explained by intellectual, sensory, or health factors.” This statement implies that students with emotional and behavioral disorders should demonstrate average levels of intelligence. However, research indicates that these students typically score in the low-to-average range of intelligence. In addition, students with severe disorders tend to have lower levels of intelligence (Kauffman and Landru, 2018; Smiley et al., 2022).

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Kauffman, J.M., & Landrum, T.J. (2018). Characteristics of emotional and behavioral disorders of children and youth (11th ed.). Pearson.

Smiley, L. R., Richards, S.B., & Taylor, R. (2022). Exceptional students: Preparing teachers for the 21st century (4th ed.). McGraw Hill.