What psychological traits are impacted by a specific learning disability?
- Students with specific learning disabilities may experience “mood and anxiety disorders, low self-esteem, sleep disorders, and disordered eating behavior” (Sofologi et al., 2022, p. 36).
- Students with a specific learning disability are more vulnerable to anxiety and depression, which causes them to have challenges with their emotional and social states compared to their classmates without specific learning disabilities.
- Anxiety disorders and self-esteem issues can cause the student to be “overwhelmed by feelings of frustration, isolation and show depressive symptoms or even physical pain”(Sofologi et al., 2022, p. 37). Students are often aware of their learning disability and how it makes them different from their peers. This can cause low self-esteem and anxiety disorders due to reflecting themselves as failures, which also contributes to adolescent depression.
- Students with a specific learning disability are vulnerable to developing eating disorder. Eating disorders are connected to the stress and anxiety the child feels caused by their learning disability. They develop restricted eating habits due to the loss of interest from sensory traits or negative consequences linked to food.
- Sleep disorders are common amongst students with specific learning disabilities. These students often develop insomnia, “which negatively affects their academic performance and their acquiring of information” (Sofologi et al., 2022, p. 40). Student with SLDs often have difficulty sleeping through the night and falling back to sleep after waking up. Sleep disorders correlates with depression and anxiety in students with specific learning disabilities.
