Oral Behaviors Checklist: Reliability of Performance in Targeted Waking-State Behaviors

Aims: To assess the consistency of intentional behavioral perfor-mance as an index of whether individuals understood the mean-ings of the behavioral terms of the Oral Behaviors Checklist, which is a self-report scale for identifying and quantifying the fre-quency of jaw overuse behaviors. Methods: Surface electromyog-raphy was used to measure bilaterally the activity of the masseter, temporalis, and suprahyoid muscles (for assessment of oral behav-iors) and the biceps muscles (reference task of biceps curl) in 27 temporomandibular disorder (TMD) cases and 27 controls. Subjects were asked to perform (1) biceps curls to lift 5 weights, with explanation, and (2) 10 oral behaviors (eg, “clench,” “yawn”) without explanation. Results: Biceps-curl performance resulted in assignments of excellent or very good for linearity-reli-ability based on inspection and correlation. Test-retest reliability of the 10 performed oral behaviors generally ranged from 0.6 to 0.98 for all 3 muscle groups, and many tasks had reliability coeffi-cients comparable to those for the biceps curl. Across tasks, eleva-tor muscle reliability of cases was 0.87, compared to 0.75 for con-trols; group values for opening muscles were similar. Conclusion: Individual subjects performed each task at a high level of consis-tency. Performance was not appreciably altered by being a TMD case versus a control and was not significantly different from the performance level of a reference task, indicating that each individ-ual understood well the meaning of each oral behavior-related word.

electromyography; oral behaviors; parafunction; reliability; temporomandibular disorders

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