In Emotion and Reading Motivation, Children With a Diagnosis of Dyslexia Are Not Just the End of a Continuum

Background: Children with dyslexia often report poor psychological well-being. We examined i) whether anxiety, self-concept, and reading motivation in children with dyslexia differed from those of controls (case-control design, Study 1a), and ii) whether these differences mirrored the linear relationships that these variables present with reading ability in children without dyslexia (dimensional approach, Study 1b).Methods: In Study 1a, 34 “Children with Dyslexia” (CwD) were compared with 191 “Typically Developing Children” (TDC) in grades 4–8 on anxiety, self-concept, reading motivation, and reading strategy using self-reports (controlling for sex, intelligence, and math ability scores). In Study 1b, the differences that emerged in Study 1a were compared with the results obtained from a simulation procedure that generated dyslexia observations under the assumptions of a dimensional hypothesis.Results: The CwD group presented small-to-moderate difficulties, which partially mirrored the predictions in the TDC group. However, violations of predictions based on the population without dyslexia were found for reading self-concept, social anxiety, and reading competitiveness.Conclusions: Children’s diagnoses affect their self-perception as readers and social anxiety in a way that cannot be inferred from linear relationships. Children with dyslexia need support to preserve an adequate image of themselves as readers and to cope with social anxiety.