Affective learning in adults with intellectual disability: an experiment using evaluative conditioning.

Blanchette et al. (2016) asked if adults with mild-moderate intellectual disability can learn to like new things through simple pairing. They used evaluative conditioning: a neutral picture was shown next to a happy face many times. Later they tested if the once-neutral picture now felt 'good'.

The team ran the same routine with typical adults for comparison. They also checked how long the new liking lasted once the happy face stopped appearing.

The adults with ID successfully learned the new emotional preference. When asked to rate the paired picture, they now chose positive words just like the typical group did.

The catch came during extinction. Once the happy face was removed, the positive feeling faded faster in the ID group. Their new liking needed more booster pairings to stick.

Nijs et al. (2016) ran a similar 2016 lab study and saw the opposite picture: the same ID adults failed badly on facial-emotion recognition tasks. Together the papers show a task-dependent strength—forming new affect works, but reading faces stays hard.

Ohan et al. (2015) systematic review backs this up, finding large, consistent emotion-recognition deficits across many studies. The target study extends that work by proving the learning mechanism itself is intact; the bottleneck is in recognition, not acquisition.

Older work by McGrother et al. (1996) already linked lower IQ to poorer emotion ID. I et al. now add that IQ does not block new emotional learning—it only speeds extinction, a detail that updates earlier views.

You can build reinforcers for adults with mild-moderate ID by pairing neutral items with already-liked stimuli. Use this to create new rewards for vocational or daily-living tasks. Plan brief booster sessions so the fresh value does not fade. Do not assume slow emotion recognition means slow emotion learning—keep teaching both skills separately.