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Emotion Recognition by Children With Down Syndrome: Investigation of Specific Impairments and Error Patterns
Abstract
The ability of children with Down syndrome to recognize expressions of emotion was compared to performance in typically developing and nonspecific intellectual disability groups matched on either MA or a performance-related measure. Our goal was to (a) resolve whether specific emotions present recognition difficulties; (b) investigate patterns of errors; and (c) explore the relationships among emotion-recognition ability and cognitive, linguistic, and adaptive behavior levels. Emotion-recognition ability in the Down syndrome group was significantly poorer than in the typically developing group overall, particularly for fearful expressions. Error patterns and relationships between task performance and assessment measures also differed across groups. Findings are consistent with a neurological explanation of specific deficits in sociocognitive functioning in children with Down syndrome.
... As emphasized by Channell, Conners, and Barth (2014), there is a lack of evidence as to whether children with DS develop these skills enough and are able to use them efficiently. Research on emotion in DS has mainly focused on the ability to recognize facial expressions from photographs (Cebula, Wishart, Willis, & Pitcairn, 2017;Hippolyte, Barisnikov, & Van der Linden, 2008;Hippolyte, Barisnikov, Van der Linden, & Detraux, 2009;Kasari, Freeman, & Hughes, 2001;Pochon & Declercq, 2013, 2014Williams, Wishart, Pitcairn, & Willis, 2005;Wishart, Cebula, Willis, & Pitcairn, 2007) or from video sequences (Channell et al., 2014;Pochon et al., 2017). Most studies have concluded that persons with DS may have a deficit in the ability to identify the emotional expressions of others (Cebula et al., 2017;Hippolyte et al., 2008Hippolyte et al., , 2009Williams et al., 2005;Wishart et al., 2007), although four studies did not (Channell et al., 2014;Pochon et al., 2017;Pochon & Declercq, 2013;Roch, Pesciarelli, & Leo, 2020). ...
... Research on emotion in DS has mainly focused on the ability to recognize facial expressions from photographs (Cebula, Wishart, Willis, & Pitcairn, 2017;Hippolyte, Barisnikov, & Van der Linden, 2008;Hippolyte, Barisnikov, Van der Linden, & Detraux, 2009;Kasari, Freeman, & Hughes, 2001;Pochon & Declercq, 2013, 2014Williams, Wishart, Pitcairn, & Willis, 2005;Wishart, Cebula, Willis, & Pitcairn, 2007) or from video sequences (Channell et al., 2014;Pochon et al., 2017). Most studies have concluded that persons with DS may have a deficit in the ability to identify the emotional expressions of others (Cebula et al., 2017;Hippolyte et al., 2008Hippolyte et al., , 2009Williams et al., 2005;Wishart et al., 2007), although four studies did not (Channell et al., 2014;Pochon et al., 2017;Pochon & Declercq, 2013;Roch, Pesciarelli, & Leo, 2020). Although these studies involved the understanding of emotional terms (except for Declercq, 2013, andPochon et al., 2017), they did not explore the emotional lexicon per se, despite its potential role in facial expression recognition. ...
... While some studies have evidenced a deficit in the ability to identify others' emotional expressions (Cebula et al., 2017;Hippolyte et al., 2008Hippolyte et al., , 2009Williams et al., 2005;Wishart et al., 2007), other studies have failed to find a difference between persons with DS and TD individuals (Barisnikov et al., 2020;Channell et al., 2014;Pochon et al., 2017;Pochon & Declercq, 2013). The idea that this discrepancy may be explained by the role of emotional vocabulary knowledge has been discussed by Pochon and Declercq (2014) and Cebula et al. (2017). ...
We studied comprehension of emotion versus concrete/abstract words in Down syndrome (DS). Study 1 compared 26 participants with DS and 26 typically developing (TD) children matched on verbal ability. Results showed no difference between groups. Study 2 assessed whether chronological age (CA) and (non)verbal abilities predicted developmental trajectories of comprehension in 36 children with DS and 143 TD children. For the latter, these variables predicted comprehension of all three word types. For the former, receptive vocabulary predicted comprehension of all word types, but CA and nonverbal reasoning only predicted comprehension of concrete words. This suggests that people with DS have no specific emotional lexicon deficit. Supporting their general lexical development would help them access abstract and emotional meanings.
... Most recent studies of emotional expression recognition in DS have used tasks that mobilize emotional vocabulary and have shown deficits in both children [30][31][32][33][34] and adults with DS [35,36]. It is important to note that the deficits found in these studies are rarely general but tend to concern certain specific expressions. ...
... It is important to note that the deficits found in these studies are rarely general but tend to concern certain specific expressions. The expressions that have often proven problematic for participants with DS have mainly been expressions of fear [32,33,37], surprise [34], anger [30] and sadness [31]. However, in a longitudinal study, Pochon and Declercq [38] found no differences in emotion recognition between children with DS (6.0-14.8 ...
... This lack of an emotion recognition deficit in participants with DS, of the same DA as the TD group, corroborated the study by Channell et al. [40], which also made use of dynamic stimuli (video sequences), and the study by Pochon and Declercq [38], which made use of vocalizations and static stimuli (photos). However, these results are contrary to those of most studies of emotion recognition in children with DS [30,[32][33][34]37,39]. This difference in results, with better performance by people with DS, might be explained by the choice of different methodologies, particularly the nature of the stimuli presented to participants: video sequences instead of photos, as in the study by Channell et al. [40], versus the use of auditory emotional cues (prosody), as in the study by Pochon and Declercq [38], in which vocalizations were heard. ...
Background:
Children with Down syndrome (DS) often experience behavioral and emotional issues that complicate their socialization process and may lead to psychopathological disorders. These problems may be related to deficits affecting emotional knowledge, particularly emotional vocabulary. Because emotional vocabulary makes it easier for typically developing children to identify emotions, a deficit affecting it in DS could be problematic.
Methods:
Twenty-eight adolescents with DS matched with typically developing (TD) children for their score on the Benton Facial Recognition Test were asked to recognize six emotional expressions presented in the form of filmed sequences, based on (1) nonverbal cues such as prosody, and (2) an emotional label.
Results:
The adolescents with DS recognized the six basic emotional expressions at a level comparable to that of the TD children in both conditions (with and without emotional vocabulary), but the facilitating effect of vocabulary was lower in that group.
Conclusions:
This study does not show a deficit affecting emotion recognition in DS, but it emphasizes the importance of early acquisition of emotional knowledge in this syndrome. Regular and varied use of internal state words should be encouraged in familial interactions, and education should include specifically adapted social and emotional learning programs.
... In children with DS, theory of mind performance is a greater relative challenge compared with children with other neurogenetic syndromes and intellectual disabilities, and their performance falls below their overall nonverbal cognitive abilities [14,15]. Affect and emotion recognition is also an area of challenge in DS in comparison with children with typical development matched on cognitive or receptive language level [16,17]. Studies using the Social Responsiveness Scale, Second Edition (SRS-2) [18] describe social communication and interactions in individuals with DS at low risk for ASD and show that these individuals have relative strengths in social motivation and challenges with social cognition, communication, and awareness [5,19]. ...
... A variety of measures have been used in past social cognition research in DS. Most of these measures are laboratory-based and include false belief tasks involving the location of objects [15,21,22] or the content of a container [15], appearance reality tasks [15,22], and emotion-matching tasks [16,17,23]. Although the majority of research on social cognition is completed with toddlers and preschool-aged children [9], these measures are used in the assessment of older children, adolescents, and young adults with DS [14,15]. ...
... Feasibility was below a priori criterion for the NEPSY-II Affect Recognition and floor effects were observed for both raw and standard scores and most problematic for standard scores. Low feasibility and standard scores on this measure may be, in part, due to difficulties individuals with DS have with recognizing emotional expressions in others [16,17]. Difficulty understanding the task was the greatest reason for noncompletion and assessments of affect recognition with simpler instructions and task demands may be needed for this population. ...
Individuals with Down syndrome (DS) are often described as socially engaged; however, challenges with social cognition, expressive language, and social interaction are also common in DS and are prospective outcomes of interest for clinical trials. The current study evaluates the psychometric properties of standardized measurements of social cognition and social behavior for potential use as outcome measures for children and adolescents with DS. Seventy-three youth ages 6 to 17 years old (M = 12.67, SD = 3.16) with DS were assessed on social cognition subtests of a neuropsychological assessment at two time points. Caregivers also completed a parent-report measure of social behavior. Measures were evaluated for feasibility, test-retest reliability, practice effects, convergent validity, and associations with broader developmental domains (i.e., age, cognition, and language). All social cognition and behavior measures met criteria for a portion of the psychometric indices evaluated, yet feasibility limitations were identified for the Developmental Neuropsychological Assessment, Second Edition (NEPSY-II) Affect Recognition subtest, and the NEPSY-II Theory of Mind subtest had problematic floor effects for percentile ranks. The Social Responsiveness Scale, Second Edition (SRS-2; T-scores) had high feasibility, moderate to excellent test-retest reliability, and no practice effects, suggesting this measure could be appropriate for use in clinical trials involving youth with DS.
... In this regard, findings suggest both etiological and developmental differences in the emotion recognition abilities (recognition and processing of facial expressions) of children with DS in comparison to TD children (Barisnikov, Thomasson, Stutzmann, & Lejeune, 2019;Kasari, Freeman, & Hughes, 2001;Martínez-Castilla, Burt, Borgatti, & Gagliardi, 2015;Pochon & Declercq, 2014). In this regard, research has shown that individuals with DS have difficulties in recognizing negative emotions like sadness (Porter, Coltheart, & Langdon, 2007), fear (Cebula, Wishart, Willis, & Pitcairn, 2017;de Santana, de Souza, & Feitosa, 2014;Kasari et al., 2001;Porter et al., 2007;Williams, Wishart, Pitcairn, & Willis, 2005;Wishart & Pitcairn, 2000), anger (Kasari et al., 2001;Porter et al., 2007) or disgust (de Santana et al., 2014). However, Wishart, Cebula, Willis, and Pitcairn (2007)) highlighted the existence of particular problems regarding the recognition of fearful facial expressions, and argued that this difficulty was not generalized to all emotions. ...
... Nevertheless, these error patterns have been investigated by few authors, and almost all of them focus on facial expression recognition. Williams et al. (2005) and Wishart et al. (2007) reported that children with DS only tended to confuse the negative facial expressions of fear and sadness. However, other studies stated that children with DS also tended to choose positive expressions instead of negative ones, that is, they selected an emotion in the opposite hedonic tone (Kasari et al., 2001;Porter et al., 2007). ...
... However, there are other participants with DS that select atypical options for those stories, and this happens when those emotions are within the negative valence. It seems that, when the situations are unfamiliar or hypothetical, they tend to confuse them in a more atypical way, in accordance with previous finings (Williams et al., 2005;Wishart et al., 2007). ...
Background
Adults with Down Syndrome (DS) present difficulties in emotion understanding, although research has mainly focused on emotion recognition (external aspects), and little is known about their performance in other complex components (mental and reflective aspects).
Aims
This study aims to examine different aspects of emotion understanding in adults with DS, including a codification of their error pattern, and also to determine the association with other variables that are commonly impaired in adults with DS.
Methods and procedures
Twenty-two adults with DS and twenty-two children with typical development (TD) matched for vocabulary level were assessed with the Test of Emotion Comprehension (TEC), along with other non-verbal reasoning (NVR), structural language and working memory (WM) tasks.
Outcomes and results
Adults with DS showed lower emotion competence than children with TD in different components of the TEC, and also a different pattern of errors was observed. Structural language, NVR and WM predicted distinct emotion understanding skills in different ways.
Conclusions and implications
It is important to plan interventions aimed at improving particular aspects of emotion understanding skills for adults with DS, taking into account the different components, the type of error and the different cognitive and linguistic skills involved in each emotion understanding skill.
... However, adults with DS showed significant difficulties in identifying sadness in emotion situations (on EAT), while they performed well in identifying sadness in isolated facial expression tasks from the Bruce et al. (2000) battery. Interestingly, adults with DS had good performance for the fear expression, while recognition of the fearful facial expression seems to be particularly difficult for children with DS (Cebula et al., 2017;Kasari et al., 2001;Williams et al., 2005). Differences across tasks and emotions support the suggestion of Widen andRussell (2010a, 2010b) who proposed that the developmental trajectory of face-context integration varied according to the type of emotion, but question its possible parallel development with the facial expression recognition in DS children. ...
... The deficit in recognition of some specific emotion expressions (e.g. surprise, fear, anger) in the population with DS was reported by several authors (Cebula et al., 2017;Virji-Babul et al., 2012;Williams et al., 2005;Wishart & Pitcairn, 2000). This could result from a deficit in perceptual processing strategy that may be particularly challenged in the matching task as no emotion cue was given. ...
... Moreover, our children with DS also had lower scores for situations eliciting fear than their NT controls. This is in accordance with previous studies in children with DS reporting a particular deficit in the recognition of fear in isolated facial expressions (Cebula et al., 2017;Kasari et al., 2001;Williams et al., 2005;Wishart et al., 2007) and in context (Kasari et al., 2001). As for adults with DS , they had good performances in the EAT for the situation of fear. ...
This research aimed to assess two components of emotion knowledge (EK): receptive EK with face emotion identification and matching tasks, and emotion situation knowledge with the emotion attribution task (EAT). Study 1 assessed the development of EK in 265 neurotypical (NT) children (4–11 years), divided into four age groups. Overall, results showed a significant improvement of EK with age in the NT population for the three tasks, especially between the ages of 4/5 and 6/7. Children were less successful at the EAT in comparison to the other two tasks, indicating that receptive EK develops earlier than emotion situation knowledge. The presence of visual context (EAT) does not help to improve our children’s overall facial emotion recognition, especially for anger and sadness, while these emotions are well recognized in isolated facial expressions (emotion identification). Study 2 compared EK between 32 children with Down syndrome (CA: M = 13 years, SD = 2.13) and 32 NT children (CA: M = 5.3 years, SD = 1.36): matched on a vocabulary task. Children with DS had more difficulties in EK than NT children. They had lower performances on the identification and the EAT tasks, while exhibited similar performances to their NT controls on the emotion matching task. Moreover, good abilities to identify emotion expressions seem to be a prerequisite for successful face-context recognition in NT children, but not in children with DS. Difficulties encountered by children with DS could result from executive dysfunction when dealing with complex visual information in addition to emotion processing difficulties.
... Some recent studies have found emotional difficulties in children and adolescents with DS (Fidler et al., 2008;Jahromi et al., 2008;Martinez-Castilla et al., 2015;Goldman et al., 2017). These works noted weaknesses in emotion recognition of individuals with DS which cannot be explained by their level of cognitive ability (Wishart and Pitcairn, 2000;Williams et al., 2005;Wishart et al., 2007;Cebula et al., 2017). Wishart and Pitcairn (2000) compared a group of individuals with DS to two control groups matched for the level of cognitive ability: one group was composed by children with typical development and the other was composed by individuals with non-specified intellectual disability (ID). ...
... Therefore, the impaired performance of DS individuals in this task cannot be attributed to intellectual disability and was, instead attributed to specific features of DS. In line with this interpretation, Williams et al. (2005) hypothesized that there might be a specific impairment of emotion recognition in DS. ...
... In addition, Kasari et al. (2001) highlighted that children with DS tend to choose positive expressions instead of negative ones and vice versa. Finally, other atypical errors were highlighted by Williams et al. (2005) and Wishart et al. (2007): they reported that children with DS tended to confuse fear with sadness. ...
Emotion recognition from facial expressions and words conveying emotions is considered crucial for the development of interpersonal relations (Pochon and Declercq, 2013). Although Down syndrome (DS) has received growing attention in the last two decades, emotional development has remained underexplored, perhaps because of the stereotype of high sociability in persons with DS. Yet recently, there is some literature that is suggesting the existence of specific deficits in emotion recognition in DS. The current study aimed to expand our knowledge on how individuals with DS process emotion expressions from faces and words by adopting a powerful methodological paradigm, namely priming. The purpose is to analyse to what extent emotion recognition in DS can occur through different processes than in typical development. Individuals with DS (N = 20) were matched to a control group (N = 20) on vocabulary knowledge (PPTV) and non-verbal ability (Raven’s matrices). Subsequently a priming paradigm was adopted: stimuli were photos of faces with different facial expressions (happy, sad, neutral) and three words (happy, sad, neutral). On a computer screen the first item (face or word) was presented for a very short time (prime) and afterward a stimulus (face or word) appeared (target). Participants had to recognize whether the target was an emotion (sad/happy) or not (neutral). Four prime-target pairs were presented (face-word; word-face; word-word; face-word) in two conditions: congruent (same emotion prime/target) and incongruent (different emotion prime/target). The results failed to show evidence for differential processing during emotion recognition between the two groups matched for verbal and non-verbal abilities. Both groups showed a typical priming effect: In the incongruent condition, slower reaction times were recorded, in particular when the target to be recognized is the face, providing evidence that the stimuli were indeed processed. Overall, the data of the current work seem to support the idea of similar developmental trajectories in individuals with DS and TD of the same verbal and non-verbal level, at least as far as the processing of simple visual and linguistic stimuli conveying basic emotions is concerned. Results are interpreted in relation to recent finding on emotion recognition from faces and words in DS.
... This may result from a specific emotional lexicon deficit as they have fewer difficulties in matching than in the emotion labels used in tasks (Kasari et al., 2001;Pochon & Declercq, 2014). Other studies have suggested the presence of more general difficulties in distinguishing and decoding the basic facial emotion stimuli in individuals with DS, present even in tasks with minimized language demand (Williams, Wishart, Pitcairn, & Willis, 2005). Thus perceptual emotion-recognition (matching facial expressions) and linguistic (emotion label understanding) seem to be problematic in the DS population (Kasari et al., 2001;Hippolyte, Barisnikov, Van der Linden, & Detraux, 2009;Williams et al., 2005) According to Cebula et al. (2010Cebula et al. ( , 2017 there is still a lack of experimental evidence to conclude a specificity of emotion recognition profile that characterizes DS. ...
... Other studies have suggested the presence of more general difficulties in distinguishing and decoding the basic facial emotion stimuli in individuals with DS, present even in tasks with minimized language demand (Williams, Wishart, Pitcairn, & Willis, 2005). Thus perceptual emotion-recognition (matching facial expressions) and linguistic (emotion label understanding) seem to be problematic in the DS population (Kasari et al., 2001;Hippolyte, Barisnikov, Van der Linden, & Detraux, 2009;Williams et al., 2005) According to Cebula et al. (2010Cebula et al. ( , 2017 there is still a lack of experimental evidence to conclude a specificity of emotion recognition profile that characterizes DS. It is difficult to reach conclusions about the origin of these difficulties due to inconsistent results between studies, mainly because of methodological issues. ...
... In contrast, the abilities of children with DS to process masked faces were comparable to those of the MA only, suggesting the presence of a developmental delay rather than a specific deficit in configural processing abilities. These results are in accordance with studies in children with DS (Williams et al., 2005;Wishart et al., 2007) and adults (Hippolyte et al., 2008(Hippolyte et al., , 2009 reporting their recognition abilities of complete faces were comparable to the MA group, but lower for masked faces. ...
The main purposes of this research were to examine the relation between the processing of face identity and emotion expressions and then discern the significance of emotional expressions using Bruce et al. tasks. Two studies were conducted. Study 1 examined 225 typically developing (TD) children age 4 to 12. Results suggested that early recognition of complete faces and interpretation of emotional expression might depend on local processing abilities, while the recognition of masked faces and emotion expression matching seemed to share configural processing. Study 2 compared 22 children with Down syndrome (DS) to two TD groups matched on mental age (MA group) and chronological age (CA group). Results showed that children with DS processed the identity of complete faces (local processing) similarly to the MA and CA groups. In contrast, their performances for masked faces (configural processing) indicated a developmental delay as they were only comparable to the MA group. Children with DS were also able to identify the emotion expressions according to labels as well as the two control groups, while they had more difficulties on the matching condition. Furthermore, specific difficulties in processing the surprise expression were observed, rather than general difficulties in encoding emotion expressions. Finally, their performances on emotion matching tasks seemed to be supported by local information processing, which might explain their lower scores compared to CA controls that mainly used configural information. These results could aid in the development of targeted interventions for DS to improve their social skills.
... Our ability to recognize facial expressions of emotion like a happy face or an angry one as well as the capacity to discriminate them from neutral expressions be- gins to develop early in life (around 4 to 9 months of age; Williams, Wishart, Pitcairn, & Willis, 2005). Increment in facial recognition expertise seems to be related to general aspects of cognitive and perceptual development (Mondloch, Maurer, & Ahola, 2006). ...
... Since recognizing emotional faces have a relevant influence on social relationships establishment and maintenance (Williams et al., 2005), low accuracy in this ability prevents people to take on opportunities to establish pro-social interactions and to avoid potential social dangers (e.g. Marsh, Kozak, & Ambady, 2007). ...
... This behavior has been related to facial information recognition difficulties. For example, regarding emotion face recognition studies, DS children do present lower recognition accuracy scores than those obtained with typical children and children and adolescents with intellectual disabilities having the same mental age (Williams, Wishart, Pitcairn, & Willis, 2005;Wishart, Cebula, Willis, & Pitcairn, 2007). These difficulties arise in particular with the emotions of fear and surprise . ...
... Regarding the recognition of emotional facial expressions, the summary by Cebula et al. [13] reported on the problems experienced by children and adults with DS in different studies, which could be related to specific features noted in studies of social referencing [14,15]. In children and adolescents with DS, the deficits reported in various studies relate essentially to the recognition of fear, surprise and anger [10,[16][17][18]. Cebula et al. [13] emphasize that, unlike what has been found in ASD, these are subtle differences that only appear in comparison with typically developing (TD) children of the same DA and not when the comparison is with other participants with IDs of different etiologies. ...
... As in the study by Pochon and Declercq [24], the non-use of emotional vocabulary in the instructions and the formulation of responses undoubtedly avoided certain errors related to insufficient mastery of emotional vocabulary. In this regard, Williams et al. [18] emphasized that certain problems experienced by some of the participants in their study might have been related to a poorer understanding of language even though their verbal level was monitored. Similarly, Kasari et al. [9] mentioned that children with DS, in conversation with their mothers, may have been less exposed to words relating to internal states and therefore might have a less extensive emotional vocabulary [40]. ...
... Similarly, Kasari et al. [9] mentioned that children with DS, in conversation with their mothers, may have been less exposed to words relating to internal states and therefore might have a less extensive emotional vocabulary [40]. In addition, the administration of tasks that make use of dynamic stimuli-which are more ecological-appears to be more appropriate for assessing participants with DS than traditional tasks with static stimuli; that is true of this study and the one by Channell et al. [23], which did not find evidence at that time of the deficits mentioned [9,10,17,18,25]. Nevertheless, Martínez-Castilla et al. [27], despite their use of animated faces (morphing), found that participants with DS had more problems than TD participants and those with WS, but as they point out, the task was a labeling task, which requires productive verbal skills. ...
Several studies have reported that persons with Down syndrome (DS) have difficulties recognizing emotions; however, there is insufficient research to prove that a deficit of emotional knowledge exists in DS. The aim of this study was to evaluate the recognition of emotional facial expressions without making use of emotional vocabulary, given the language problems known to be associated with this syndrome. The ability to recognize six emotions was assessed in 24 adolescents with DS. Their performance was compared to that of 24 typically developing children with the same nonverbal-developmental age, as assessed by Raven's Progressive Matrices. Analysis of the results revealed no global difference; only marginal differences in the recognition of different emotions appeared. Study of the developmental trajectories revealed a developmental difference: the nonverbal reasoning level assessed by Raven's matrices did not predict success on the experimental tasks in the DS group, contrary to the typically developing group. These results do not corroborate the hypothesis that there is an emotional knowledge deficit in DS and emphasize the importance of using dynamic, strictly nonverbal tasks in populations with language disorders.
... Negative expressions such as anger and fear seemed to be harder to recognize, although the results varied among studies. Kasari et al. (2001) found a tendency to mistake a negative emotion for a positive one; this error pattern was not confirmed by Williams et al. (2005). The large variety of stimuli (photographs, schematic drawings, vocalization) and task conditions (identification , labeling, emotion-to-story matching) as well as the limited number of items used by most of the researchers restricted the generalization of their results. ...
... However, we do not have information about emotional recognition abilities in adults with Down syndrome as, to our knowledge, no studies have yet been published. One study of children with Down syndrome (Williams et al., 2005) included adolescents up to 17 years of age, and the results showed that they did not outperform their younger peers. This finding suggests that adults with Down syndrome probably do not process emotional stimuli better than do children. ...
... The Down syndrome group performed relatively well on the first two subtests (Complete Faces Dissimilar/Similar), and their results on the Identity Matching Test did not differ from those of the control group. This seems to suggest that these adults do not have difficulties when processing faces that are presented in their entirety, which is consistent with the findings of studies of children with Down syndrome (Williams et al., 2005; Wishart & Pitcairn, 2000). On the other hand, the Down syndrome group's performance dropped to chance in the last three subtests, in which some features (ears, hair, eyes) were concealed . ...
... In a study of the ability of teenagers with DS to recognize facial expressions of emotion, Williams, Wishart, Pitcairn, and Willis (2005) Wechsler, 1990) and Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC-III; Wechsler, 1992). To match participants with regard to performance criteria, the Benton Facial Recognition Test was administered (Benton, Sivan, Hamsher, Varney, & Spreen, 1983). ...
... Numerous studies have focused on the processing of faces in children with DS. Most of the studies addessed the recognition of facial emotional features (Cebula, Moore, & Wishart, 2010;Williams et al., 2005;Wishart & Pitcairn, 2000;Wishart, Cebula, Willis, & Pitcairn, 2007) and compared children to DS and children with other kinds of intellectual disabilities but who had equivalent cognitive and linguistic status in a very heterogeneous age group, including preschoolers and teenagers. Williams et al. (2005) compared a DS group (7.6-17.6 years old) with children with nonspecific intellectual disabilities (6-17.4 years old) and typically developing children (2.7-5.5 years old). ...
... Most of the studies addessed the recognition of facial emotional features (Cebula, Moore, & Wishart, 2010;Williams et al., 2005;Wishart & Pitcairn, 2000;Wishart, Cebula, Willis, & Pitcairn, 2007) and compared children to DS and children with other kinds of intellectual disabilities but who had equivalent cognitive and linguistic status in a very heterogeneous age group, including preschoolers and teenagers. Williams et al. (2005) compared a DS group (7.6-17.6 years old) with children with nonspecific intellectual disabilities (6-17.4 years old) and typically developing children (2.7-5.5 years old). Wishart et al. (2007) compared an intellectual disability group that included DS children (6-18 years old) with typically developing children (2.7-7.5 years old). ...
Down syndrome (DS) is one of the most common chromosomal abnormalities. Delays in cognitive development are found in the first years of life. As years pass, it may turn into intellectual deficiencies that unfold into several aspects, including difficulty recognizing emotional facial expressions. The present study investigated the recognition of six universal facial emotional expressions in a population of children aged 6-11 years who were divided into two groups: DS group and typically developing children (TDC) group. We used the Perception Test of Facial Emotional Expressions (Teste de Percepção de Emoções Faciais; TEPEF) and Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC-III) and found that children with DS presented alterations in the recognition of expressions of disgust, surprise, and fear, whereas the recognition of happiness, sadness, and anger was maintained at a level comparable to the TDC group. Participants with DS presented significant positive correlations between sadness and Picture completion, Mazes, Arithmetic, Vocabulary, Digits, Verbal IQ, Verbal Comprehension Index, and Working Memory Index. All other facial expressions showed significant negative correlations with the Intelligence Quotient and WISC-III factorial index subtests. Absence of correlations was found among the TEPEF's six facial expressions and Information, Coding, Symbols, and Working Memory Index. The contribution of this study is related to understanding the characteristics of the recognition of facial emotions in children with DS, an important component of social relationships with their peers, schools, and families.
... Despite the perception of interpersonal understanding, sociability, and empathy as areas of strength for individuals with Down syndrome (Wishart, Cebula, Willis, & Pitcairn, 2007), several studies point to limitations in facial emotion processing (Kasari, Freeman, & Hughes, 2001;Williams, Wishart, Pitcairn, & Willis, 2005;Wishart et al., 2007). These deficits emerge as early as 3 to 4 years of age, and unlike the pattern of development for typically developing individuals, individuals with Down syndrome do not show continuing improvement with increasing mental or chronological age (Wishart et al., 2007). ...
... labeling or choosing "sad" for "angry"). Williams et al. (2005) studied the emotion recognition abilities of 34 young individuals (ranging in age from 7.67 to 17.67 years) with Down syndrome (DS) and two comparison groups: individuals (ranging in age from 6 to 17.42) with nonspecific intellectual disabilities (NSID; n=53) and typically developing (TD) individuals (ranging in age from 2.75 to 5.58) matched to the Down syndrome group on mental age (n=39). ...
... The authors also included an identity matching task to serve as a control. Williams et al. (2005) found a significant main effect of group membership (DS, NSID, TD) on emotion matching performance. Post hoc analyses revealed the DS group performed significantly below the TD group; however, there was no significant difference in performance between the DS group and the NSID group. ...
... Problems with face processing seem to depend on the aetiology of ID. A broad consensus indicates that these difficulties are observed in people with DS and in those with unspecified ID, but no difficulties have been observed in people with other conditions, such as William Syndrome (WS) [37][38][39][40][41]. The influence of the material (social/non-social) on CMI in people with DS is an open question. ...
... We hypothesise that interference resolution, depending on the material, may be related to the aetiology of IDs. In research on face recall in individuals with DS, difficulties have been observed when recalling this material [38,40,70]. However, other authors observed that in individuals with WS, face recall in WM tasks was better [71]. ...
Background
Cognitive inhibition is one of the executive functions; this process over memory plays a fundamental role in recalling relevant information. The aims of this study were to understand the effects of maintenance load and stimuli on the operation of cognitive inhibition over memory in working memory tasks in adults with Down syndrome.
Method
The study included 36 individuals with Down syndrome (mean age = 33.44 years, standard deviation = 7.54 years, 50% women) and 36 individuals with neurotypical development (mean age = 33.55 years, standard deviation = 7.52 years, 50% women). The participants performed a working memory task in which they had to solve an interference problem during the maintenance phase.
Results
The Down syndrome group performed worse on cognitive inhibition over memory than the neurotypical development group. Both groups had lower recall with interference and under high-load conditions. In the neurotypical development group, memory was similar with both materials. The Down syndrome group performed better with non-social stimuli than with social stimuli.
Conclusions
Understanding the variables that influence cognitive inhibition over memory will help in planning effective interventions for people with Down syndrome. Considering the results, special importance should be placed on work with social stimuli, at least in individuals with Down syndrome.
... It aims to investigate social functioning in an age cohort of six-yearold children with DS compared to typically developing controls and to investigate possible differences in predictors between groups. developing children, children with DS show weaknesses in other aspects of social capabilities: [15] Planning, problem solving [16] and playing (e.g., with objects) [17] have been identified as weak in this population. It should be noted that controlled for language abilities children with DS have been found to perform at the same developmental level as mental age-matched typically developing controls on emotion knowledge. ...
... [18] It should be mentioned, however, that others have found that children with DS had weaker emotion recognition skills compared to typically developing children of a similar mental age. [15] The differences in results among studies may arise from methodological differences, such as the participants' age or the use of static vs. dynamic or visual vs. oral stimuli. [18] In the present study, although the children with DS had levels of prosocial behaviours similar to those of nonverbal mental age-matched controls, they did not show as much prosocial behaviour as typically developing children of a similar chronological age when gender, parental education and nonverbal mental age were controlled for. ...
Background:
Practitioners and researchers have asserted for decades that social functioning is a strength in children with Down syndrome (DS). Nevertheless, some studies have concluded that children with DS may be at greater risk of impaired social functioning compared to typically developing controls. This cross-sectional study explores the profile of social functioning (social capabilities and social problems) in six-year-old children with DS, compares it with that of typically developing children and reveals possible differences in predictors between groups.
Method:
Parental reports and clinical tests were utilized.
Results:
The children with DS had generally weaker social capabilities compared to nonverbal mental age-matched controls, but no significant differences were found for social interactive play, community functioning and prosocial behaviour. No significant differences in predictors for social capabilities between the groups were found. The children with DS had more social problems than the typically developing controls with a similar chronological age and those with a similar nonverbal mental age, but no significant differences in emotional symptoms were found between the children with DS and either comparison group. Vocabulary was a more important predictor of social problems in the children with DS than in the typically developing control groups.
Conclusion:
Interventions for children with DS should strongly focus on integrating vocabulary skills and social functioning starting at an early age. Implications for Rehabilitation Children with Down syndrome need help and support in social functioning. Systematic training to optimize social capabilities and to prevent social problems should be prioritized. Structured and explicit learning of words important for social interaction with peers and for conflict solutions should be emphasized. Integrated interventions focusing on social functioning and vocabulary should begin in preschool to prepare children for participation in mainstream education.
... The ability to recognise facial expressions is central to forming social relationships. Drawing from prior studies, Williams, Wishart, Pitcairn, and Willis (2005) showed that children with DS had specific difficulties in processing emotional expression and theorised that it is evidence that cognitive pathways of children with DS are markedly different than those of typical children. This study and others have found that children with DS may experience difficulties with some very specific aspects of sociocognitive understanding, including empathising, requesting behaviours, and social referencing (Williams et al., 2005). ...
... Drawing from prior studies, Williams, Wishart, Pitcairn, and Willis (2005) showed that children with DS had specific difficulties in processing emotional expression and theorised that it is evidence that cognitive pathways of children with DS are markedly different than those of typical children. This study and others have found that children with DS may experience difficulties with some very specific aspects of sociocognitive understanding, including empathising, requesting behaviours, and social referencing (Williams et al., 2005). ...
The focus of this quasi-experimental pilot study is how to support the emergence of the full potential development of nonverbal social skills in children with Down syndrome (DS). It is an exploratory case study using an embedded-multiple case design. This study views working with the social skills of a 6-year-old girl with DS through the lens of the Kestenberg Movement Profile (KMP). Through this lens, the social intelligence, relational shaping, developmental movement, and nonverbal communication of a child with DS were explored. In order to more accurately identify the child's strengths and challenges a triangulation approach is used. Data were collected for the child with DS and her typically developing, fraternal, twin sister using the Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scales-II as a quantitative assessment tool, the KMP as a qualitative assessment tool, and from a naturalistic observation in their home environment in order to assess and compare their nonverbal social skills.
... A final CNN network was used to achieve this, resulting in an improved accuracy rate of 83.53% for sadness and 87.41% for anger. It is essential to emphasize the focus on these emotions because the existing literature suggests that detecting negative emotions in people with Down syndrome is a highly complex task [31]. ...
This research introduces an algorithm that automatically detects five primary emotions in individuals with Down syndrome: happiness, anger, sadness, surprise, and neutrality. The study was conducted in a specialized institution dedicated to caring for individuals with Down syndrome, which allowed for collecting samples in uncontrolled environments and capturing spontaneous emotions. Collecting samples through facial images strictly followed a protocol approved by certified Ethics Committees in Ecuador and Colombia. The proposed system consists of three convolutional neural networks (CNNs). The first network analyzes facial microexpressions by assessing the intensity of action units associated with each emotion. The second network utilizes transfer learning based on the mini-Xception architecture, using the Dataset-DS, comprising images collected from individuals with Down syndrome as the validation dataset. Finally, these two networks are combined in a CNN network to enhance accuracy. The final CNN processes the information, resulting in an accuracy of 85.30% in emotion recognition. In addition, the algorithm was optimized by tuning specific hyperparameters of the network, leading to a 91.48% accuracy in emotion recognition accuracy, specifically for people with Down syndrome.
... Challenges are reported among children with DS in interpreting emotional cues, including a greater propensity for confusing a positive emotion for a negative one ) and difficulties with interpreting neutral or surprised emotional displays (Hippolyte et al. 2008). Another study reported that although happiness was commonly interpreted correctly, children with DS demonstrated a range of incorrect interpretations for the dimensions of disgust, surprise, fear and sadness (Williams et al. 2005). ...
Background:
Down syndrome (DS) is associated with elevated rates of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and autism symptomatology. To better characterise heterogeneity in ASD symptomatology in DS, profiles of caregiver-reported ASD symptoms were modelled for children and adolescents with DS.
Methods:
Participants (n = 125) were recruited through several multi-site research studies on cognition and language in DS. Using the Social Responsiveness Scale-2 (SRS-2; Constantino and Gruber 2012), two latent profile analyses (LPA) were performed, one on the broad composite scores of social communication and interaction and restricted interests and repetitive behaviour, and a second on the four social dimensions of social communication, social motivation, social awareness, and social cognition.
Results:
A three-profile model was the best fit for both analyses, with each analysis yielding a low ASD symptom profile, an elevated or mixed ASD symptom profile and a high ASD symptom profile. Associations were observed between profile probability scores and IQ, the number of co-occurring biomedical conditions reported, sex, and SRS-2 form.
Conclusions:
Characterising heterogeneity in ASD symptom profiles can inform more personalised supports in this population, and implications for potential therapeutic approaches for individuals with DS are discussed.
... However, later studies show that people with Down syndrome perform worse than their matched counterparts who are not mentally retarded in terms of ToM skills (Yirmiya et al, 1998;Zelazo, 1996). Also the people with the Down syndrome have difficulties in understanding others' emotions such as fear, surprise and anger (Wishart & Pitcairn, 2000;Kasari Freeman & Hughes, 2001;Williams, Wishart, Pitcairn & Willis 2005;Wishart, Cebula, Willis & Pitcairn, 2007a;Hippolyten, Barisnikov & van der Linden, 2008a). In Turkey the studies conducted by Atasoy (2008) to analyse the theory of mind properties and related factors mentally retarded children were included as a comparison group. ...
... 53 Previous literature suggested that they have a better understanding of understanding emotions as expressed by facial expression as compared to other forms of intellectual disabilities. 54 Later studies looking into emotional processing in children with DS concluded that there were emotional perception deficits. 55 A child with DS has been stereotyped to be affectionate, charming and friendly. ...
Down syndrome (DS), or trisomy 21, is the most common genetic syndrome associated with intellectual disability. Despite the variability in expression, there is a distinct developmental phenotype characterized by deficits in learning/memory, executive functions, and language skills accompanying the psychomotor delay. The severity of intellectual impairment has the dominant effect on functioning, other influences such as parental and societal attitudes, supports available and social opportunities also play a role in the attainment of skills.
... Emotion knowledge-recognizing others' expressions of emotion and understanding their causes-appears as a strength in older youth and adults with DS. This comes from recent evidence that individuals with DS can recognize others' basic emotions during tasks when language processing and memory demands are low (Carvajal et al., 2012;Cebula et al., 2017;Channell, Conners, et al., 2014;Hippolyte et al., 2009;Pochon & Declercq, 2013; but see K. R. Williams et al., 2005). There is also evidence, however, that these rudimentary social-emotional strengths may not support later developing, more complex social cognitive abilities such as perspective-taking (Cebula et al., 2010;Hahn, 2016). ...
Purpose
This article (a) examined the cross-sectional trajectories of mental state language use in children with Down syndrome (DS) and (b) identified developmental factors associated with its use.
Method
Forty children with DS aged 6–11 years generated stories from a wordless picture book and completed an assessment battery of other linguistic, cognitive, and social–emotional skills. Their narratives were coded for mental state language density (the proportion of utterances containing mental state references) and diversity (the number of different mental state terms used).
Results
The emergence of mental state language use during narrative storytelling was observed across the sample; 0%–24% of children's utterances included references to mental states, and a variety of mental state terms were produced. Cross-sectional developmental trajectory analysis revealed that expressive vocabulary and morphosyntax were significantly related to increased mental state language density and diversity. Nonverbal emotion knowledge was significantly related to greater diversity of mental state terms used. Age and nonverbal cognition were not significant factors.
Conclusions
This first in-depth, within-syndrome characterization of mental state language use by school-age children with DS provides an important next step for understanding mental state and narrative development in this population. By identifying skills associated with the development of mental state language, this study provides an avenue for future longitudinal research to determine causal relationships, ultimately informing intervention efforts.
... Most research in this area has focused on other components of emotion regulation, such as facial recognition of emotional expressions (Moore, Conners, & Barth, 2014;Pochon et al., 2017;Pochon & Declerq, 2013;Pochon & Declerq, 2014;Santana, De Souza, & Feitosa, 2014). Results have highlighted that children and adolescents with DS show some difficulties in areas such as recognition of complex emotions like fear or surprise, when compared to typically developing and nonspecific intellectual disability children (Moore et al., 2014;Pochon & Declerq, 2014;William, Wishart, Pitcairn, & Willis, 2005;Wishart, Cebula, Willis, & Pitcairn, 2007). These findings have important implications because they show that people with DS have difficulties with emotional features, and in so they have to be taken into account when it comes to intervention. ...
Introduction: There is evidence of high rates of psychopathological disorders such as anxiety or depression in adults with Down syndrome. Additionally, difficulties in executive functions and emotion regulation play an essential role in adaptive functioning of people with Down syndrome.
Method: We used different questionnaires with a sample of 42 adults with Down syndrome (aged 18–40 years) to determine if difficulties in executive functions and emotion regulation are related to and can predict internalising symptoms.
Results: Positive and significant correlations were found between dysexecutive functioning and emotion dysregulation and internalising symptoms. Multiple linear regression analyses indicated that dysexecutive functioning and emotion dysregulation are both predictors of the existence of internalising symptoms.
Conclusions: These findings suggest that intervention in emotion regulation and executive functions must be taken into account in order to positively influence the presence of internalising symptoms. Further research is needed to attend to both capacities comprehensively, especially concerning emotion regulation.
... On an emotion attribution task with faces, adults with DS exhibit difficulties with sad face expressions (Hippolyte et al., 2008) similar to poor recognition of sad point-light dance (Virji-Babul et al., 2006; see above). By contrast, other studies report that individuals with DS have some troubles in facial affect recognition, in particular, in interpreting fear and surprise (Wishart and Pitcairn, 2000;Wishart, 2001;Williams et al., 2005;Wishart et al., 2007;Cebula and Wishart, 2008;Iarocci et al., 2008;Cebula et al., 2017). In DS, when happy and angry faces are used as either positive or negative feedback on a task, angry faces do not inhibit subsequent performance (Goldman et al., 2018). ...
Individuals with Down syndrome (DS) are widely believed to possess considerable socialization strengths. However, the findings on social cognition capabilities are controversial. In the present study, we investigated whether individuals with DS exhibit shortage in face tuning, one of the indispensable components of social cognition. For this purpose, we implemented a recently developed Face-n-Food paradigm with food-plate images composed of food ingredients such as fruits and vegetables. The key benefit of such face-like non-face images is that single elements do not facilitate face processing. In a spontaneous recognition task, 25 children with DS aged 9 to 18 years were presented with a set of Face-n-Food images bordering on the Giuseppe Arcimboldo style. The set of images was administered in a predetermined order from the least to most resembling a face. In DS individuals, thresholds for recognition of the Face-n-Food images as a face were drastically higher as compared not only with typically developing controls, but also with individuals with autistic spectrum disorders and Williams-Beuren syndrome. This outcome represents a significant step toward better conceptualization of the visual social world in DS and neurodevelopmental disorders in general.
... Kako su pozitivne interakcije majka-dete i veća responzivnost majke povezane sa napretkom deteta u socijalnim, komunikacionim i kognitivnim veštinama (Landry, Smith, & Swank, 2006), važno je razmotriti obrasce rane interakcije dece sa Daunovim sindromom i njihovih roditelja. Istraživanja su pokazala da ova deca mogu biti manje responzivni komunikacioni partneri za svoje roditelje, naročito u ranom detinjstvu, jer slabije iniciraju komunikaciju, pokazuju niži opšti kvalitet obrazaca društvenog ponašanja (Adamson, Bakeman, Deckner, & Nelson, 2012) i slabije prepoznaju emocije nego deca tipičnog razvoja istog mentalnog uzrasta (Williams, Wishart, Pitcairn, & Willis, 2005). Nadalje, socijalni signali koje produkuju ova deca manje su predvidivi, jasni i učestali, pa ih njihovi roditelji češće pogrešno interpretiraju ili propuštaju da uoče ove signale. ...
Deca sa Daunovim sindromom od najranijeg detinjstva pokazuju niz speci-fičnosti i teškoća u oblasti verbalne i neverbalne komunikacije, koje u manjoj ili većoj meri perzistiraju kod ove populacije i kasnije tokom života. Kako se ove teškoće mogu uočiti rano u razvoju i kako ova deca u prvim godinama ži-vota provode najveći deo vremena u porodičnom okruženju, njihovi roditelji mogli bi imati značajnu ulogu u ranom stimulisanju govora i komunikacije. Cilj rada odnosi se na utvrđivanje karakteristika i značaja rane interakcije dece sa Daunovim sindromom i njihovih roditelja za razvoj komunikacionih sposobnosti ove dece, kao i identifikovanje potencijalnih pravaca intervencije u ovoj oblasti koji podrazumevaju angažovanje roditelja. Na osnovu pregleda i analize dostupne literature može se zaključiti da uče-stalost i stil interakcije, responzivnost roditelja za komunikacione pokušaje deteta, uvremenjenost odgovora roditelja i praćenje detetovih interesovanja u komunikaciji mogu biti povezani sa kasnijom komunikacionom kompe-tencijom dece sa Daunovim sindromom. Posebno se ističe značaj zajedničke, strukturisane igre ove dece sa roditeljima, kao metod unapređenja kvali-teta te igre, što je važan prediktor razvoja govorne komunikacije. Takođe, pokazalo se da su programi rane intervencije koji se zasnivaju na poveća-nju responzivnosti roditelja za komunikaciono ponašanje njihove dece sa Daunovim sindromom i obučavanju roditelja strategijama podsticanja ra-zvoja komunikacionih sposobnosti deteta u kućnim uslovima efikasni u una-pređenju kvantiteta i kvaliteta jezičkih sposobnosti i komunikacije ove dece.
... In studies of emotion knowledge among people with Down syndrome, the most commonly used methodology is the matching or labelling of facial expressions. Based on evidence from these tasks, children with Down syndrome have been found to show deficits both in recognizing fearful expressions relative to typically developing children matched for a mental age (MA) of 4.25 years (Williams, Wishart, Pitcairn, & Willis, 2005) and in perceiving surprise as compared to a group of typically developing children ages 3 to 5 years who were matched for perceptual and performance demands of the facial expressions task (Wishart & Pitcairn, 2000). In a study of children with Down syndrome at two different MAs, no differences were displayed in comparison to typically developing children matched with an MA of 3 years, but a specific difficulty with the emotion of anger was found relative to typically developing children and children with other etiologies of intellectual disability (ID) when matched at an MA of approximately 4 years (Kasari Freeman, & Hughes, 2001). ...
The focus of this study was the ability of adolescents and young adults with Down syndrome to infer meaning from facial expressions in the absence of emotion labels and use this inference in order to adjust their behavior. Participants with Down syndrome ( N = 19, mean nonverbal mental age of 5.8 years) and 4- to 7-year-old typically developing children performed a novel task in which happy and angry faces were provided as feedback for a choice made by the participants. In making a subsequent choice, the participants with Down syndrome performed similarly to the 4 year olds, indicating a difficulty using angry faces as feedback. Individual differences within the group were also apparent. Implications for the development of social competence are discussed.
... Like children with WS, children with DS have been described as more sensitive and attentive to other people's emotions than other children with ID and as having a more marked interest in faces (Kasari and Freeman, 2001). Regarding their EFER capacities, several studies have shown deficits compared to TD-DA participants (Kasari and Freeman, 2001;Williams et al., 2005;Wishart et al., 2007;Pochon and Declercq, 2014), but certain recent studies using a non-verbal protocol and/or dynamic stimuli did not show any difference at equivalent developmental ages (Pochon and Declercq, 2013;Channell et al., 2014). ...
The hypersocial profile characterizing individuals with Williams syndrome (WS), and particularly their attraction to human faces and their desire to form relationships with other people, could favor the development of their emotion recognition capacities. This study seeks to better understand the development of emotion recognition capacities in WS. The ability to recognize six emotions was assessed in 15 participants with WS. Their performance was compared to that of 15 participants with Down syndrome (DS) and 15 typically developing (TD) children of the same non-verbal developmental age, as assessed with Raven’s Colored Progressive Matrices (RCPM; Raven et al., 1998). The analysis of the three groups’ results revealed that the participants with WS performed better than the participants with DS and also than the TD children. Individuals with WS performed at a similar level to TD participants in terms of recognizing different types of emotions. The study of development trajectories confirmed that the participants with WS presented the same development profile as the TD participants. These results seem to indicate that the recognition of emotional facial expressions constitutes a real strength in people with WS.
... According to [8] similar patterns of misidentification appear to exist in those with intellectual disabilities. Children with mental retardation show specific difficulties in processing emotional expressions that are not shared by typically developing children [12]. In keeping with previous evidence, happiness was found to be the easiest emotion to identify, followed by sadness and anger [9]. ...
Deficits in intellectual ability have been linked to deficits in emotion understanding and consequently social competence. Research suggests that individuals with mental retardation exhibit deficits in their ability to identify emotional states in themselves and others, relative to normal mental age matched controls and peers and display an inability to decode facial expressions of emotion. Emotional experience is elicited in part by a cognitive appraisal of a situation toward a goal. However, the ecological validity of previous studies is limited. In this study we developed new materials to investigate the emotion understanding skills of persons with mild to moderate mental retardation. Six tasks included faces displaying emotion in context, comic strips, audio, video and audio-visual material of individuals expressing emotions in context. Results indicated that the mentally retarded were able to identify emotions in context than expressions without context and emotion understanding improved with increasing contextual cues and dynamic content.
... Emotion specific deficits in the ability to perceive emotion in the faces of others (i.e., deficits in perceiving some emotions but not others) has been identified in non-clinical adult populations (Schlegel et al., 2012), but it is more often identified in clinical populations (e.g., persons with Down syndrome; Williams, Wishart, Pitcairn, & Willis, 2005), suggesting that emotion perception ability might be emotion specific. Emotion specificity in emotion perception ability is also supported by neuroimaging evidence that certain brain regions are associated with the perception or feeling of a Emotion Perception & Empathy 9 specific emotion. ...
Numerous theories posit a positive relation between perceiving emotion expressed in the face of a stranger (emotion perception) and feeling or cognitively understanding the emotion of that person (affective and cognitive empathy, respectively). However, when relating individual differences in emotion perception with individual differences in affective or cognitive empathy, effect sizes are contradictory, but often not significantly different from zero. Based on 4 studies (study ns range from 97 to 486 persons; ntotal = 958) that differ from one another on many design and sample characteristics, applying advanced modeling techniques to control for measurement error, we estimate relations between affective empathy, cognitive empathy, and emotion perception. Relations are tested separately for each of the 6 basic emotions (an emotion-specific model) as well as across all emotions (an emotion-general model). Reflecting the literature, effect sizes and statistical significance with an emotion-general model vary across the individual studies (rs range from -.001 to .24 for emotion perception with affective empathy and -.01 to .39 for emotion perception with cognitive empathy), with a meta-analysis of these results indicating emotion perception is weakly related with affective (r = .13, p = .003) and cognitive empathy (r = .13, p = .05). Relations are not strengthened in an emotion-specific model. We argue that the weak effect sizes and inconsistency across studies reflects a neglected distinction of measurement approach-specifically, empathy is assessed as typical behavior and emotion perception is assessed as maximal effort-and conclude with considerations regarding the measurement of each construct. (PsycINFO Database Record
... In studies of attention patterns, infants with Down syndrome were found to spend more time looking at their mothers than at objects relative to typically developing infants of the same chronological age (Gunn, Berry, & Andrews, 1982) or to preterm infants matched for mental age (Landry & Chapieski, 1990). Although individuals with Down syndrome typically show relative competence in forming interpersonal relationships (Fidler, Most, Booth-LaForce, & Kelly, 2008;Oates, Bebbington, Bourke, Girdler, & Leonad, 2011), they also show difficulties in some aspects of interpersonal functioning (e.g., Wishart, Willis, Cebula, & Pitcairn, 2007) and, in particular, in emotion recognition (Kasari, Freeman, & Hughes, 2001;Porter, Coltheart, & Langdon, 2007;Williams, Wishart, Pitcairn, & Willis, 2005;Wishart & Pitcairn, 2000). Similar to the findings among persons with Williams syndrome, persons with Down syndrome experience more difficulty identifying negative emotions, even when considered in relation to the level expected from their intellectual development (Cebula, Moore, & Wishart, 2010). ...
Individuals with Williams syndrome and those with Down syndrome are both characterized by heightened social interest, although the manifestation is not always similar. Using a dot-probe task, we examined one possible source of difference: allocation of attention to facial expressions of emotion. Thirteen individuals with Williams syndrome (mean age = 19.2 years, range = 10–28.6), 20 with Down syndrome (mean age = 18.8 years, range = 12.1–26.3), and 19 typically developing children participated. The groups were matched for mental age (mean = 5.8 years). None of the groups displayed a bias to angry faces. The participants with Williams syndrome showed a selective bias toward happy faces, whereas the participants with Down syndrome behaved similarly to the typically developing participants with no such bias. Homogeneity in the direction of bias was markedly highest in the Williams syndrome group whose bias appeared to result from enhanced attention capture. They appeared to rapidly and selectively allocate attention toward positive facial expressions. The complexity of social approach behavior and the need to explore other aspects of cognition that may be implicated in this behavior in both syndromes is discussed.
... The significance of discrepancy between manifested paralinguistic elements and meanings of spoken messages was recognized by Morris (Moris, 2005, according to Panić Cerovski, 2012), describing the phenomenon as "nonverbal leakage", that is, the phenomena when paralinguistic elements give away the speaker without his/her knowledge. By reviewing the literature it could be seen that the ability to identify, understand and produce paralinguistic elements of communication is more often studied in a population of children with intellectual disability (Setter, Stojanovik, Van Ewijk, & Moreland, 2007; Stojanovik, 2011; Williams, Wishart, Pitcairn, & Willis, 2005; Wishart, Cebula, Willis, & Pitcairn, 2007; Yirmiya, Kasari, Sigman, & Mundy, 1989) and autism (Castelli, 2005; Grossman, Bemis, Skwerer, & Tager-Flusberg, 2010; Lindner & Rosén, 2006; McCann, Peppé, Gibbon, O'Hare, & Rutherford, 2007; Peppé, McCann, Gibbon, O'Hare, & Rutherford, 2006; Tanaka, Kashioka, & Campbell, 2011; Wang, Lee, Sigman, & Dapretto, 2006; Yirmiya et al., 1989), than in a population of adults with intellectual disability. Accordingly, the subjects of this theoretical paper are paralinguistic abilities of adults with intellectual disability. ...
Many of the authors agree with the statement that the facial expression and prosodic
acoustic characteristics together represent the paralinguistic characteristics of communication
and that they provide an answer to the question "How something is said?" Some of the functions
of paralinguistic elements of communication include the ability to make a conclusion about the
speaker's attitude or his emotional reactions, identifying personal characteristics of the speaker,
concluding about their demographic characteristics, the ability to use paralinguistic signs as
signals for the regenerative response and synchronization of conversation as well.
The aim of this paper is to isolate and analyze research which as their focus had an
assessment of paralinguistic elements in adults with intellectual disability by reviewing the
available literature.
By searching electronic databases, the papers in which the issue of the ability to
recognize and interpret paralinguistic characteristics of persons with intellectual disabilities
were collected and analyzed.
2
By reviewing analyzed papers, it could be seen that the issue of the ability of
understanding and interpretation of paralinguistic aspects of communication is more often
studied in a population of adults with intellectual disability and syndromic specifics, than in the
population of persons with intellectual disability syndromes without syndromic manifestations.
Presented results of the researches show that adults with Down and Williams syndrome, as well
as persons with intellectual disabilities have emphasized difficulties in detecting negative
emotion in tasks of facial and vocal expression.
Despite many functions of paralinguistic segments of communication, it was observed
that in the population of adults with intellectual disability the most often investigated ability
was the one to recognize emotional reactions with the help of facial and prosodic expression.
Also, it could be concluded that, in the papers in which the ability to recognize facial and
prosodic emotions was evaluated, the ability to correlate these constructs significant for
pragmatic competence, such as the ability of theory of mind, social competence, ability to
recognize irony and deception in testimony etc. was missing.
Key words: emotional prosody, facial expression, syndromic specifics
... The question arises whether facial scales for selfreporting pain could be used in individuals with DS. These individuals show deficits in recognising facial expressions of fear, surprise, anger, sadness, and a neutral state (Hippolyte, Barisnikov, & Van der Linden, 2008;Hippolyte, Barisnikov, Van der Linden, & Detraux, 2009;Kasari, Freeman, & Hughes, 2001;Porter, Coltheart, & Langdon, 2007;Williams, Wishart, Pitcairn, & Willis, 2005;Wishart & Pitcairn, 2000;Wishart, Cebula, Willis, & Pitcairn, 2007). However, other researchers have not found statistically significant abnormalities in performance on emotion-matching tasks by children with DS (Martínez-Castilla, Burt, Borgatti, & Gagliardi, 2015;Pochon & Declercq, 2013). ...
Background Adults with Down syndrome (DS) are at risk for age-related painful physical conditions, but also for under-reporting pain. Pictograms may facilitate self-report of pain, because they seem suitable for the global visual processing in DS and for iconic representation of abstract concepts.Method Participants (N = 39, M age = 41.2) assigned pain qualities to pictograms, rated pain affect levels in facial scales (pictograms vs. drawn faces), and performed cognitive tests.Results Recognition of all intended pain qualities was above chance level. Pain affect levels of both facial scales were ordered equally well. Both facial scales were preferred equally well. Comprehension of the 3 scales was positively associated with mental age, receptive language ability, and verbal memory. Most participants (74%) had pictograms in their direct environment, mainly to communicate activities or objects.Conclusion Using pictograms may optimise communication about pain for a subgroup of cognitively higher functioning adults with DS.
... Overall, research in this field suggests that persons with DS have some facial emotion recognition difficulties. For instance, regarding identity matching tasks using faces, young PWDS are less accurate in recognizing emotional faces than typical children with the same mental age, as well as children and adolescents with the same mental age having another intellectual disability [8,7]. Specifically, it has been observed that children with DS have more problems recognizing fear and surprise [6]. ...
Background : This paper aimed to explore the ability of people with Down syndrome (PWDS) in recognizing facial emotion by considering automatic cognitive processing levels of face recognition. Method : A sample of PWDS and participants with typical development (PWTD) participated in a set of two affective priming studies. In each study, participants had to categorize an emotional or neutral target face that was preceded by another emotional face. Stimuli presentation for each facial set (one face after another) was conducted by using an stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) of 300 ms with the inter-stimulus interval (ISI) set at 50 ms. The first affective priming study manipulated emotion congruency between prime and target emotional faces to explore emotion classification abilities and to identify the cognitive mechanisms underlying automatic recognition of some emotional faces. The second study explored the effect that gender of a face has over categorization of facial emotion and difficulty in recognizing negative facial expressions. Results : The results strongly suggest that not all of the PWDS present difficulties in recognizing negative facial emotions. PWDS’ performance pattern in categorizing emotion was similar to that of PWTDs if they had to use broad classification categories (e.g., emotion vs. no emotion). However, differences between both samples occurred if PWDS had to use a specific category task (e.g., classification of happiness, sadness, etc.). Conclusions : At least two emotion information processing styles can be identified in PWDS. Methodological and theoretical implications for exploring the emotional capabilities of people with DS are discussed.
... They have unstable emotion in the process of learning difficult things and strict upbringing by parents. They also have significantly poorer emotion-recognition ability than in the typically developing children particularly for fearful expressions due to presence of specific deficits in socio-cognitive functioning as well as their morphological differences in the facial expressions and their biochemical and neurological anomalies [59]. Lack of proper labeling emotions in DS children may hamper their achievement of emotional language referring to their own internal states. ...
Children and adolescents with DS are exposed to significant physical, sexual and emotional developmental changes. They also often have some psychiatric problems as externalizing disorders, depression, anxiety and/or obsessive-compulsive disorder.
They also suffer from behavior and psychosocial problems in the process of their growth, such as expressing their feelings, learning problems as their shortage of language and cognition. Children with DS are amenable for good education and they can enter a special education school for special education, so that training of their fine motor, gross motor and intellectual abilities is helpful to improve their development.
They can be encouraged to improve body functions and accentuating gaining more functional proficiencies that facilitate improving participation in age-suitable activities. Early detection and proper treatment of emotional, psychiatric or developmental disorders ensure good prognosis.
... While the underlying causes for cognitive delays/deficits for individuals with Down syndrome are still poorly understood, it is recognized that these deficits do often impede an individual"s ability to appropriately seek out and participate in social interactions (Cebula, Moore & Wishart, 2010). One reason postulated as to why individuals with Down syndrome have such difficulty understanding and responding appropriately within social contexts has been that these individuals have difficulties in recognizing and interpreting emotional cues observed in others (Williams, Wishart, Pitcairn & Willis, 2005;Kasari, Freeman & Hughes, 2001). ...
1. Resumen El trabajo propuesto presenta el levantamiento y análisis de cuatro emociones de personas con Síndrome de Down (SD), disgusto, felicidad, tristeza y sorpresa, en función de sus expresiones faciales, tomando como referencia el Sistema de Código de Unidades Faciales, planteado por Paul Ekman, el cual se basa en el estudio universal de los movimientos de los músculos del rostro, conocidos como Unidades de Acción (AUs). Para el presente estudio se levantó una base de datos de imágenes de personas con SD, tomadas de la web con acceso libre. La herramienta utilizada para realizar la obtención de características fue Open Face 2.0, la que dispone de código abierto para desarrollo de temas de investigación. Se analizó la estadística de activación de 18 AUs a través de la función densidad de probabilidad (PDF) para obtener la aproximación teórica existente a través de la relación Kullback Leibler Divergence (KLD), tomando en cuenta que una emoción está formada por una o varias AUs. Fueron obtenidos histogramas de frecuencia relativa de la activación de cada AU y se realizó su evaluación estadística para determinar la PDF teórica a la que corresponde, lo que permite disponer una base de datos para el estudio de emociones de personas con SD en futuros trabajos que utilizan inteligencia computacional. 2. Introducción Para que los seres humanos se desarrollen en cualquier actividad, necesitan comunicarse e interactuar con el mundo que los rodea, siendo las emociones un medio que permite establecer y mantener relaciones sociales. El rostro es un importante canal de comunicación no verbal (Baltrusaitis,2018), existen regiones muy significativas cuando se muestran emociones: la boca, las cejas y los ojos (Bettadapura, 2012). Las expresiones faciales revelan la intención, muestran afecto, expresan emoción y ayudan a regular los turnos durante la conversación (Ambady, 1992)(Ekman, 1982). Al hablar de sistemas automáticos de reconocimiento de expresiones faciales, podemos mencionar las siguientes etapas: detección de cara, extracción de características, aprendizaje del sistema y clasificación de la expresión (Wu, Fu, Yang, 2012). En 1998 T. Kanade y H. Schneiderman desarrollaron un algoritmo de detección de objetos usando métodos estadísticos, que permitieron la detección del rostro, independientemente de su posición es decir podía estar de frente, hacia la izquierda o derecha, etc) (Schneriderman, Kanade, 2004). En el 2001 P. Viola y M. Jones desarrollaron un método que permite detectar objetos en tiempo real, basado en un algoritmo de aprendizaje en cascada (Viola, 2001). En la actualidad se está utilizando modelos parametrizados, que usan un conjunto de polígonos para formar una malla que se superpone a las caras y se adapta a ellas. Paul Ekman y Wallace V. Friesen desarrollaron en 1978 el Sistema de Codificación de Acción Facial (FACS), una herramienta que permite la descripción objetiva de las expresiones faciales características para cada emoción (6 emociones básicas o también llamadas primarias: alegría, tristeza, miedo, disgusto, asco, sorpresa), pues cada una tiene un patrón de respuesta fisiológico específico y reconocido en todas las culturas y por todas las personas. Basado en la detección de cambios que se producen en el rostro con las acciones de los músculos faciales, a estas acciones se les denomina AUs (Ekman, 2006), y se definieron 46 AUs basados en estudios psicológicos. Dentro de FACS también se puede hablar de 5 niveles de intensidad para la emoción. Cada emoción está formada por una combinación de AUs. 3. Metodología La información obtenida para realizar el levantamiento de imágenes de emociones de personas con SD, fue extraída de la web, tomando en cuenta que sean de libre acceso. Para el procesamiento de los datos con el objetivo de extraer características se utilizó la herramienta Open Face 2.0, capaz de detectar hitos faciales con precisión, reconocer unidades de acción facial, estimar la postura de la cabeza y la posición de la
This study compared mental state language (talk about emotions, thoughts, intentions, etc.) used by 6- to 11-year-old children with Down syndrome (DS) to a younger typically developing (TD) comparison group matched by nonverbal cognition. We aimed to determine (1) whether mental state language use is delayed in DS relative to developmental expectations, and (2) if there are differences between groups in the association between mental state language and developmental factors (emotion knowledge, expressive language). Rate of mental state language use was significantly lower in the group with DS, but the number of different mental state terms was not significantly different. Nuanced patterns of similarity and difference emerged between groups regarding the association between mental state language and other developmental factors.
As do those in the general population, individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) must make significant life decisions. In this chapter, we delineate some of the advances made toward understanding the link between etiology and decision making among individuals with IDD. We discuss the principles employed to examine etiology and various issues of decision making, in terms of the general population and for individuals with IDD. We illustrate etiological differences by providing an overview of differences in decision making patterns among persons with Williams syndrome, Prader-Willi syndrome, and Down syndrome, along with corresponding behavioral implications. We conclude with recommendations for etiology-specific interventions to improve the decision making of persons with IDD.
This chapter examines the affective life of adults with ID, referring to their spiritual life, intimate life, emotional intelligence, psychological capital, and motivation. First, the chapter presents the dire lack of research and attention to affect and specifically to emotional intelligence (EI) in the field of ID, including in ID definitions and policy. Next, three models of EI are reviewed, which were designed for normative development, as well as related concepts. In presenting research studies related to affect, EI, spiritual life, singlehood, psychological capital, and motivation – a clear pattern emerged of similarity between the ID and typical groups. This chapter discusses the implications of these findings for the mediation of affect and policies for individuals with ID.
Introduction. Different studies show high rates of psychopathological disorders, such as anxiety or depression, in adults with Down syndrome (DS). In addition, some variables such as executive functions (EF) and emotion regulation (ER), essential elements in adaptive behavior, present deficits in these people. Method. This study aimed to investigate the influence of EF and ER on the development of internalizing symptoms (depression and anxiety) in adults DS. DEX, ERC and PIMRA-II questionnaires were used with a sample of 40 adults to determine whether difficulties in executive functions and emotional regulation are related to the appearance of internalized symptoms in this population. Results. Results show the association between EF, ER and depression and anxiety. Likewise, there is a relation between internalizing symptomatology and life events such as the death of a familiar. Discussion. Intervention in ER and EF should be considered to prevent the appearance of internalized symptoms and the development of emotional disturbances. More research is needed to intervene in both capacities in a more comprehensive way, especially with regard to emotion regulation.
Purpose: Children with Down syndrome often have more restricted emotion expression and recognition skills than their peers who are developing typically, and potentially fewer opportunities to learn these skills. This study investigated the effect of the Strategies for Talking about Emotions as PartnerS (STEPS) programme on parents’ provision of opportunities for emotion communication using visual communication supports.
Method: The study used a single-subject multiple-baseline across participants design with three parent–child dyads. Shared book reading was used as the context for parent instruction and data collection.
Result: Parents increased their use of the emotion communication strategies immediately following an instructional session, and continued to use them for the remaining phases of the study. In turn, the children participated more actively in the discussion by making comments about emotions when parents provided more opportunities.
Conclusion: The STEPS instructional programme is effective for improving parents’ provision of opportunities for discussing emotions during storybook reading with children who have Down syndrome. All parents indicated that they would use the strategy during future reading activities. This paper discusses the results of the study and directions for future research.
This article describes an investigation that is on a scale of assessment of learning potential applies to 32 preschool children with Down syndrome and 32 with specific language impairment.
The goal of this study was to examine whether the cognitive profile of the groups can be improved through a methodology as is the learning potential. The results showed that there were no significant differences in the situation pretest between both groups for the majority of the subscales, and with regard to the second objective is noted that there were differences between score postest and pretest between both groups, as well as in the second group where all the differences were
significant except for classification and auditory memory.
The concept of inclusive education within the Australian context is portrayed. The autoethnographic experiences of the authors presented in the form of case studies provide vivid descriptions of how students with special educational needs and disabilities are supported within mainstream Australian classrooms. In particular, interesting inclusive strategies outline the ways in which students with disabilities are included in mainstream classrooms across the three states in Australia – South Australia, New South Wales and Queensland. The total education plan has been taken into consideration while providing deep insights into the inclusive practices undertaken for the case study of students.
Some children with Down syndrome may experience difficulties in recognizing facial emotions, particularly fear, but it is not clear why, nor how such skills can best be facilitated. Using a photo-matching task, emotion recognition was tested in children with Down syndrome, children with nonspecific intellectual disability and cognitively matched, typically developing children (all groups N = 21) under four conditions: veridical vs. exaggerated emotions and emotion-labelling vs. generic task instructions. In all groups, exaggerating emotions facilitated recognition accuracy and speed, with emotion labelling facilitating recognition accuracy. Overall accuracy and speed did not differ in the children with Down syndrome, although recognition of fear was poorer than in the typically developing children and unrelated to emotion label use. Implications for interventions are considered.
Cette recherche s’intéresse à la relation entre la Théorie de l’Esprit (ToM) et le psychodrame de groupe chez un groupe d’adolescents présentant une déficience intellectuelle (DI moyenne ; QI entre 45 et 55) en Institut Médico-Educatif (IME). L’étude teste l’hypothèse que la pratique du psychodrame de groupe permet une amélioration de la Théorie de l’Esprit. Pour cela les chercheurs réalisent une évaluation en deux temps (T0 avant la mise en place du psychodrame et T1 après 12 séances) de la ToM d’un groupe expérimental, composé de six adolescents participants aux groupes « psychodrame », à celle d’un groupe contrôle, composé de neuf jeunes de la même structure ne bénéficiant pas de cette prise en charge. L’étude met en évidence que, sur certains aspects, le psychodrame peut contribuer au développement de la ToM, notamment dans la compréhension des émotions d’autrui.
Based in classic developmental theory and in more than two centuries of ever increasingly sophisticated medical thinking and science, the developmental approach has transformed the theory, methodology, and interpretation of the study of persons with intellectual disability. The primary contributions include the differentiation among persons with intellectual disability by etiology, the application of developmental principles to the specific etiological groups, the emphasis on mental age (MA) (rather than chronological age; CA), and the consideration of the “whole person” along with his or her family and community. In debunking the monolithic approach to intellectual disability as a single disorder, the developmental approach allows for considerably more precision in the study of this population and the resultant rejection of common myths, albeit as part of a process that highlights the extent to which this field is a nascent one. In highlighting the broadening of the understanding of persons with intellectual disability, we review contributions from the study of social competence, language development, and family relations. We then introduce the potential impact and current limitations of the application of cutting-edge technology in the study of neuroscience among persons with intellectual disability.
The adequate interpretation of facial expressions of emotion is crucial for social functioning and human interaction. New methods are being applied, and a review of the methods that are used to evaluate facial emotion recognition is timely for the field. An extensive review was conducted using the Web of Science, PsycINFO, and PubMed databases. The following keywords were used to identify articles that were published within the past 20 years: emotion recognition, face, expression, and assessment. The initial search yielded 291 articles. After applying the exclusion criteria, 115 articles were included in this review. Articles were analyzed using 3 different approaches: (a) non-behavior-dependent methodologies (MRI and electroencephalography [EEG]), (b) behavioral instruments that were used to assess facial emotion recognition, and © instruments or methods that were used to assess facial recognition impairment in health conditions. The behavioral instruments were further subdivided into 7 groups. Static human face stimuli were the most frequently used method, although there are some criticisms concerning the ecological validity of these types of stimuli. Nonvalidated instruments were also commonly used, especially in psychopathological studies. Computer-based morphing has been used to develop new visual stimuli, and brief videos are also being applied. Drawings, which may have lower validity, were often used for assessment in children. Research that uses functional and structural MRI or EEG as methodological alternatives has increased in the last decade. This is a rapidly changing field, and more studies are needed to compare methodologies that are used to explore impairments in facial emotion recognition. (PsycINFO Database Record
This chapter reviews studies of social and behavioral development, emotional development and temperament, and brain development and psychophysiology in children with the six most common genetic syndromes associated with developmental delay (Down syndrome, fragile X syndrome, 22q11.2 deletion syndrome, Williams syndrome, Prader-Willi syndrome, and Angelman syndrome). We review recent research on relations among brain, psychophysiological, and socioemotional development in these children, placing particular emphasis on how each of these genetic disorders provides researchers with evidence and a model to understand the links among gene-, brain-, and behavior relations.
Research into the emotional development of children with developmental disabilities has dramatically increased over the past decade. Studies investigating the development of children with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) account for the largest increase in the field, but progress has also been made in better understanding emotional development in children with Down syndrome (DS). This chapter reviews the evidence on emotional strengths and weaknesses in children with autism, DS, and other developmental disorders. It identifies continuing gaps in our knowledge of emotional development and suggests some promising lines of research for the future.
This chapter summarizes the strengths and weaknesses of the emerging language profile in children, adolescents, and young adults with Down syndrome (DS). It reviews in detail studies of expressive language skill in vocabulary, speech-motor skill, syntax, and pragmatics, and includes a section on studies of receptive language skill in vocabulary and syntax. Finally, the chapter considers proposed causes of the behavioral language phenotype and individual variation in its expression, and discusses the implications of the findings.
Adaptive behavior scales play an important role in helping practitioners diagnose, plan supports, or determine an individual's level of independence. Research is being conducted to develop specific scales to examine the underlying constructs that these scales are designed to measure. The construct of adaptive behavior is fundamental to any definition of intellectual disability (ID). Current definitions of ID include adaptive behavior as a component, but place adaptive behavior at different levels of prominence. The most widely used adaptive behavior scales provide a unified composite score in addition to individual domain scores. There are a number of unique concerns regarding the psychometric properties of tests when applied to persons with ID. Scales in which ceiling scores are established rapidly underestimates an individual's abilities in that domain if the skills have developed in an atypical order. The scales identified most frequently are the Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scales (VABS), the Adaptive Behavior Scales (ABS), and the Scales of Independent Behavior (SIB)/ Inventory for Client and Agency Planning (ICAP).
Affective expressions of 11 toddlers with Down syndrome and 11 toddlers with no disabilities were compared. Each child participated, with one parent, in a social referencing procedure. Children's MAs ranged from 12 to 23 months. Parents posed positive or fearful expressions during presentations of ambiguous stimuli. Lability and intensity of children's expressions and regulation of affect were noted. Expressions of toddlers with and without Down syndrome were equally labile and intense. However, toddlers without Down syndrome tended to match their parents' expressions. Toddlers with Down syndrome did not match their parents expressions; instead, they responded with positive affect following fearful parental communications. Results were discussed in terms of the impact of emotional predictability and responsivity on caregiving interactions.
The role of the amygdala in dyadic social interactions of adult rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) was assessed after bilateral ibotenic acid lesions. Social, nonsocial, and spatial behaviors of amygdalectomized and control monkeys were assessed in 3 dyadic experiments: constrained, unconstrained, and round robin. Lesions produced extensive bilateral damage to the amygdala. Across all experiments, the amygdalectomized monkeys demonstrated increased social affiliation, decreased anxiety, and increased confidence compared with control monkeys, particularly during early encounters. Normal subjects also demonstrated increased social affiliation toward the amygdalectomized subjects. These results indicate that amygdala lesions in adult monkeys lead to a decrease in the species-normal reluctance to immediately engage a novel conspecific in social behavior. The altered behavior of the amygdalectomized monkeys may have induced the increased social interactions from their normal companions. This is contrary to the idea that amygdalectomy produces a decrease in social interaction and increased aggression from conspecifics.
Many investigators have reported that people with mental retardation have problems on emotion-recognition tasks. The evidence for the specificity of these performance deficits is reviewed, detailed consideration of the information-processing demands of different types of emotion-recognition tasks provided, and the conclusion made that evidence from identification tasks does not support the specificity hypothesis. It is suggested that deficits on other types of tasks may be due to IQ-related deficits in memory and attention, in imagination, and in dealing with static or ambiguous stimuli. The importance of MA-matching, using control tasks, and considering the complexity, abstraction, and ecological validity of stimuli is stressed. Recommendations are made for future research, and alternative theoretical positions are presented.
The nature of the spatial representations that underlie simple visually guided actions early in life was investigated in toddlers with Williams syndrome (WS), Down syndrome (DS), and healthy chronological age- and mental age-matched controls, through the use of a "double-step" saccade paradigm. The experiment tested the hypothesis that, compared to typically developing infants and toddlers, and toddlers with DS, those with WS display a deficit in using spatial representations to guide actions. Levels of sustained attention were also measured within these groups, to establish whether differences in levels of engagement influenced performance on the double-step saccade task. The results showed that toddlers with WS were unable to combine extra-retinal information with retinal information to the same extent as the other groups, and displayed evidence of other deficits in saccade planning, suggesting a greater reliance on sub-cortical mechanisms than the other populations. Results also indicated that their exploration of the visual environment is less developed. The sustained attention task revealed shorter and fewer periods of sustained attention in toddlers with DS, but not those with WS, suggesting that WS performance on the double-step saccade task is not explained by poorer engagement. The findings are also discussed in relation to a possible attention disengagement deficit in WS toddlers. Our study highlights the importance of studying genetic disorders early in development.
This study investigated the concept of behavioral phenotypes by comparing behavior ratings of 91 children with Down syndrome, 28 children with Prader-Willi syndrome, 68 children with Angelman syndrome, and 24 children with nonspecific mental retardation. Results supported distinctive behavioral profiles for the syndrome groups. The Down syndrome group showed good social skills and low ratings of problem behaviors including hyperactivity. Children with Prader-Willi syndrome exhibited a pattern of externalizing, obsessive–compulsive, anxious, and overly sensitive behaviors. A profile of a happy disposition, hand clapping, mouthing behaviors, and severe levels of hyperactivity and attention problems emerged for children with Angelman syndrome. Implications for clinical practice and future research were discussed.
The abilities of children to distinguish between facial patterns of fear and surprise were investigated. Sixty children, 5 to 10 years old, were administered a recognition task of facial expressions and were asked to identify the facial differences shown in these emotions. The recognition accuracy was found to be related to the amount of contrast between the facial patterns of fear and surprise. Older children were more successful than younger children in both tasks. The results also revealed that children's ability to detect the distinctive action units of fear and surprise emerges later than the ability to recognize these emotions. Results are discussed in terms of perceptual development and type of knowledge (implicit vs. explicit).
Children and adults with mental retardation were tested on their ability to recognize facial expressions of emotion. The sample consisted of 80 children and adults with mental retardation and a control group of 80 nonhandicapped children matched on mental age and gender. Ekman and Friesen's normed photographs of the six basic emotions (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise) were used in a recognition task of facial expressions. Subjects were individually read two-sentence stories identifying a specific emotion, presented with a randomized array of the six photographs of the basic facial expressions of emotion, and then asked to select the photograph that depicted the emotion identified in the story. This procedure was repeated with 24 different stories, with each of the six basic emotions being represented four times. Results showed that, as a group, individuals with mental retardation were not as proficient as their mental-age-matched nonhandicapped control subjects at recognizing facial expressions of emotion. Although adults with mild mental retardation were more proficient at this task than those with moderate mental retardation, this finding was not true for children. There was a modest difference between the children with moderate mental retardation and their nonhandicapped matched controls in their ability to recognize facial expressions of disgust.
Short-term memory for verbal and visuospatial information was examined in a group of children and teenagers with Down's syndrome. Performance on the verbal task was impaired relative to matched control groups, but there were no group differences on the visuospatial task. Relatedly, the Down's syndrome group showed inferior short-term memory for verbal as opposed to visuospatial information, whereas controls showed the opposite pattern. These findings did not appear to result from a general superiority of nonverbal abilities in the Down's syndrome group, or from hearing difficulties that might have impacted on the verbal short-term memory task, in which material was presented auditorily. The results are consistent with the suggestion that Down's syndrome is associated with a selective impairment of the phonological loop component of Baddeley and Hitch's (1974) working memory model.
Although the amygdala is widely believed to have a role in the recognition of emotion, a central issue concerns whether it is involved in the recognition of all emotions or whether it is more important to some emotions than to others. We describe studies of two people, DR and SE, with impaired recognition of facial expressions in the context of bilateral amygdala damage. When tested with photographs showing facial expressions of emotion from the Ekman and Friesen (1976) series, both DR and SE showed deficits in the recognition of fear. Problems in recognising fear were also found using photographic quality images interpolated ("morphed") between prototypes of the six emotions in the Ekman and Friesen (1976) series to create a hexagonal continuum (running from happiness to surprise to fear to sadness to disgust to anger to happiness). Control subjects identified these morphed images as belonging to distinct regions of the continuum, corresponding to the nearest prototype expression. However, DR and SE were impaired on this task, with problems again being most clearly apparent in the region of the fear prototype, An equivalent test of recognition of morphed identities of six famous faces was performed normally by DR, confirming the dissociability of impairments affecting the recognition of identity and expression from the face. Further two-way forced-choice tests showed that DR was unable to tell fear from anger, but could tell happiness from sadness without difficulty. The finding that the recognition of fear can be differentially severely affected by brain injury is consistent with reports of the effects of bilateral amygdala damage in another case (Adolphs, Tranel, Damasio, & Damasio, 1994, 1995). The recognition of facial expressions of basic emotions may therefore be linked, to some extent, to specific neural substrates.
This study investigated intuitive concepts of biology, physics and psychology in typical preschoolers (N = 23), children with autism (N = 20) and children with Down's syndrome (DS; N = 18). Three tasks from Peterson and Siegal (1997) (false belief (Baron-Cohen, Leslie, & Frith, 1985), false photo (Zaitchik, 1990) and innate potential (Gelman & Wellman, 1991)) were employed. A further three tasks (perception (Slaughter & Gopnik, 1996), balance (Siegler, 1976) and illness (Kalish, 1998)) were included to gain insight into the similarities and differences in understanding across groups of children and within each domain. Preschoolers performed well on both the intuitive psychology tasks, children with autism performed poorly on these tasks, and children with DS performed well on the perception task but poorly on the false belief task. By contrast, performance on the physics and biology tasks was not significantly different across groups. These findings support the argument that cognitive development is domain-specific and highlight the need for further research in this area.
Visual fixation and positive-negative behaviors of 36 4- to 9-month-old infants to happy, angry, and neutral faces were investigated by means of an infant-control habituation-recovery procedure. Infants visually discriminated the facial expressions, and their behaviors tended to vary according to the affective meaning of each one.
Two studies assessed the organization and basis for children's categories of emotion. In one, children (N = 240) from 2 to 5 years of age and adults (N = 60) chose facial expressions that exemplify such emotion categories as fear, anger, and happiness. In the other (N =100), they grouped expressions differing in arousal level or pleasure-displeasure according to perceived similarity. Preschoolers demonstrated more knowledge of emotion than had been seen in previous investigations, in which they were said to be inaccurate in categorizing expressions of all but a few emotions. The results fit a model of emotion categories in which the boundaries separating different categories are more fuzzy than distinct, and in which the categories are interrelated in a systematic order, an order based on their degree of pleasure and arousal. Children's categories were not identical to those of adults, however; categories of the youngest children were broad, admitting as members expressions similar in pleasure and arousal, and categories of older children became increasingly narrow with age.
The object of the present study was to investigate whether 20 educable mentally retarded (EMR) children matched for verbal mental age on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT; Dunn, 1965) with 20 nonretarded (NR) controls were adept in identifying emotional facial expressions and producing the equivalent word adjectives. I also reassessed the relationship between the phase of identifying facial expressions (i.e., happy, sad, angry, and scared) and the phase of producing emotional word adjectives, consisting of 16 emotional linguistic constructions (4 short stories for each of the adjectives) between higher in verbal ability educable mentally retarded (HEMR) children and higher in verbal ability nonretarded controls (HNRC) and between low in verbal ability educable mentally retarded (LEMR) children and low in verbal ability nonretarded controls (LNRC). There were no significant differences between EMR and NR children in general, despite the fact that EMR children had deficits in receptive linguistic competence.
When mildly and severely mentally retarded people saw photographs showing expressions of basic emotions their overall performance was found to be correlated with intelligence. Certain specific patterns of confusion were determined, clinically the most significant being an inability to cope with high intensity emotions.
Fifteen postpubertal males with fragile X syndrome (FRA(X)) and 15 non-FRA(X) males matched on IQ and age were assessed for their ability to identify the facially expressed emotions of happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, and surprise. Emotions of happiness and sadness were the easiest to identify for both groups of participants. Regardless of etiology, individuals with higher IQ scores performed better at this task than did individuals with lower IQ scores. Results were consistent with findings in females having the fragile X mutation. The current study supported the notion that FRA(X) individuals are sensitive to facial emotion cues presented by others. This finding is discussed in the context of autism and gaze aversion.
Accommodation and visual acuity were measured in 53 children with Down's syndrome aged between 12 weeks and 57 months. Results were compared with data for 136 control (typically developing) children aged between 4 weeks and 48 months. Whereas the control children accommodated accurately on near targets, accommodation was defective in 92% of the children with Down's syndrome, and there was no change in accommodative ability with age. On the other hand, visual acuity lay within normal limits for the younger children. Children over the age of 2 years showed a below-normal visual acuity, which is not explained either by refractive error or by the effect of poor accommodation. The data suggest a sudden change in the rate of development of visual acuity which may be associated with physiological changes in the visual cortex. Previously reported defects of accommodation and visual acuity in older children and adults with Down's syndrome are confirmed by our findings in infants and young children.
Two independent and complementary studies were conducted to assess the ability of boys with fragile-X syndrome to recognize facial and emotional expressions. Both studies failed to find any specific deficits associated with fragile-X syndrome. The performance of the test group was comparable to the level of subjects with intellectual disability and subjects of average cognitive development matched for intellectual ability. This suggests that chronological age and intellectual level are unlikely to explain the findings. The results are discussed in the context of the controversy surrounding the relationship between autism and fragile-X syndrome. The findings are consistent with fragile-X individuals having a profile of social, communicatory and ritualistic disturbances, which in some ways may differ from those found in individuals who have more typical autistic spectrum disorders.
The objective of this study was to use high-resolution MRI techniques to determine whether children with Down syndrome exhibit decreases in hippocampal and amygdala volumes similar to those demonstrated in recent studies of adults with this condition. When corrected for overall brain volumes, amygdala volumes did not differ between groups but hippocampal volumes were significantly smaller in the Down syndrome group. These findings suggest that the hippocampal volume reduction seen in adults with Down syndrome may be primarily due to early developmental differences rather than neurodegenerative changes.
In Down's syndrome (trisomy 21), a dementia syndrome occurs that is phenotypically similar to Alzheimer's disease; the initial phase is characterized by memory loss. The authors used an in vivo structural technique in the predementia stage of Alzheimer's disease in adults with Down's syndrome to investigate whether atrophy of medial temporal lobe structures occurs in these subjects and whether volumes of these structures correlate specifically with performance on memory tests.
The subjects were 34 nondemented Down's syndrome adults (mean age=41.6 years, 17 women and 17 men) and 33 healthy comparison subjects (mean age=41.3, 15 women and 18 men). By using T(1)-weighted magnetic resonance imaging slices taken perpendicular to the Sylvian fissure, volumes of the hippocampus, amygdala, anterior and posterior parahippocampal gyrus, and temporal pole CSF were measured in both hemispheres. These data were normalized to the total intracranial volume.
For Down's syndrome, smaller volumes of the right and left amygdala, hippocampus, and posterior parahippocampal gyrus were significantly associated with greater age; this association was not seen in the anterior parahippocampal gyrus. The amygdala and hippocampus volumes were positively correlated with memory measures. For the comparison group, there was no relationship between volume and age in any region.
In the predementia phase of Down's syndrome, significant volume changes in medial temporal lobe structures occur with age and are related to memory. These structures are affected early in Alzheimer's disease in Down's syndrome, and their evaluation may help identify people in the preclinical stages of Alzheimer's disease.
The aim of this study was to investigate the types of errors produced by three participant groups (individuals with Down syndrome, with moderate learning disability, and typically developing children) whilst completing the Raven's Coloured Progressive Matrices task. An analysis of error categories revealed that individuals with Down syndrome produced a significantly different pattern of errors to the comparison groups. This difference remained, though was less marked, when the groups were matched on overall task performance. Consequently, even when the groups were making the same number of errors, they were not making the same type of errors. An investigation of age-related error patterns revealed that there was a significant change in the types of errors made by typically developing individuals with age. However, no significant age-related change was found in the types of errors made by participants with Down syndrome. The analysis also provided evidence that individuals with Down syndrome were not producing error types appropriate for their chronological age, or for their overall level of task performance. Possible explanations for these differences in terms of problems of integration of perceptual information, reduced visual acuity, and a lax criterion for task completion in Down syndrome are considered.
The ability to recognize emotions that were easily identifiable and those that were more difficult to identify, as expressed by male and female faces, was studied in 48 nondisabled children and 76 children with learning disabilities (LD) ages 9 through 12. On the basis of their performance on the Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test and the Benton Visual Retention Test, the LD group was divided into three subgroups: those with verbal (VD), nonverbal (NVD), and both verbal and nonverbal (BD) deficits. A shortened version of Ekman and Friesen's Pictures of Facial Affect, including pictures of both men and women, was the measure of ability to identify facial expressions of affect. Children of both genders in all three groups of children with LD, as well as their normally achieving peers, were more accurate in identifying expressions of affect from female faces, notwithstanding differences in sensitivity to such emotional communication in favor of the nondisabled and VD groups. However, a significant interaction was found between gender and emotional recognition difficulty level, with female faces being more expressive for emotions that were difficult to recognize.
Individuals with Williams syndrome (WS) excel in face recognition and show both a remarkable concern for social stimuli and a linguistic capacity for, in particular, emotionally referenced language. The animated full facial expression comprehension test (AFFECT), a new test of emotional expression perception, was used to compare participants with WS with both chronological and mental age-matched controls. It was found that expression recognition in WS was worse than that of chronologically age-matched controls but indistinguishable from that of mental age controls. Different processing strategies are thought to underlie the similar performance of individuals with WS and mental age controls. The expression recognition performance of individuals with WS did not correlate with age, but was instead found to correlate with IQ. This is compared to earlier findings, replicated here, that face recognition performance on the Benton test correlates with age and not IQ. The results of the Benton test have been explained in terms of individuals with WS being good at face recognition; since a piecemeal strategy can be used, this strategy is improved with practice which would explain the correlation with age. We propose that poor expression recognition of the individuals with WS is due to a lack of configural ability since changes in the configuration of the face are an important part of expressions. Furthermore, these reduced configural abilities may be due to abnormal neuronal development and are thus fixed from an early age.
Most studies of empathy have focused on young children, and those who are typically developing. Thus, we know little about the emergence and manifestation of empathy in non-normally developing children.
Empathy and response to distress in others were examined in 30 children with Down syndrome, 22 children with nonspecific etiologies of mental retardation, and 22 typically developing children.
Results indicated that compared to the other children, children with Down syndrome responded to distress in others by looking to them more, and offering more comfort in the form of prosocial responses. However, in a hypothetical empathy situation, children with Down syndrome were less likely to feel the same emotion as the protagonist than were the typical children. Children with Down syndrome differed from the children with nonspecific mental retardation only in their response to distress in others. The children with nonspecific mental retardation were more similar to than different from the MA-matched typical children.
These results suggest some etiology-associated differences in empathy and response to distress in children with mental retardation.