Investigating the relationship between observed mood and emotions in people with severe and profound intellectual disabilities.
Count how often smiles happen during liked activities; fewer smiles signal lower mood in severe ID.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team watched adults with severe or profound intellectual disability during everyday activities. They counted smiles and other small signs to see if mood and emotion could be told apart.
Staff gave each person things they usually like and things they dislike. Observers noted how often positive faces or sounds happened, not how big they were.
What they found
Good moments made smiles come more often, so mood and emotion matched for positive events. Negative items did not change the rate of smiles; intensity of reactions also did not link to mood.
In short, frequency of small positive signals, not their size, told the observer the person felt okay inside.
How this fits with other research
Perez et al. (2015) extends this idea. They showed that when interest and pleasure drop, self-injury rises months later. Both papers say: count tiny enjoy signals, not once but across weeks.
Sturmey et al. (2010) warns against treating challenging behavior as a mood clue. Together with Vos et al. (2013), the message is clear: look for fewer smiles, not more problem behavior, when mood dips.
Buhrow et al. (2003) used the same single-case watch-and-count style for visual preference. Both studies prove brief, repeated probes work for non-verbal adults with profound ID.
Why it matters
You can track mood in clients who cannot speak by tallying smiles during favorite tasks. A drop in frequency, even without new problem behavior, may flag a mood slide before injury starts. Add a quick smile count to your weekly data sheet; it takes two minutes and gives an early warning no other tool can.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
BACKGROUND: The measurement of subjective well-being in people with severe and profound intellectual disabilities (ID) is a difficult challenge. As they cannot self-report about their life satisfaction, because of severe communicative and cognitive limitations, behavioural observations of their emotions and moods are important in the measurement of their subjective well-being. It is, however, not known if observations of mood and emotion can be differentiated in people with severe and profound ID and if mood and emotions can give unique information about their affect. Therefore, the aim of this study is to examine the relationship between mood and emotions in people with severe and profound ID, using behavioural observations. As recommended in the literature, we investigated the frequency and intensity of the emotion separately. METHOD: In a period of 3 weeks 27 participants with severe and profound ID were presented with four staff-selected negative and four staff-selected positive stimuli. During the presentation participants were videotaped using the observational method of Petry & Maes where each behaviour is coded on a 5-point scale, ranging from indicating a very negative emotion to indicating a very positive emotion. As a measure of mood, the staff completed the MIPQ in the beginning of the 3 weeks. RESULTS: We found a positive relationship between mood and respectively the total emotion score and the frequency of the emotion when the stimuli were positive but not when the stimuli were negative. There was no relationship between mood and the intensity of the emotion. CONCLUSIONS: Our results indicate that mood and emotions can be distinguished from each other using behavioural observations. Both can give specific information about the affective life of people with severe or profound ID. Moreover, if further research could replicate the results of this study, an implication is that the direct support workers should be aware of a decline in the frequency of their clients reactions to positive stimuli as this could indicate a decline in their mood.
Journal of intellectual disability research : JIDR, 2013 · doi:10.1111/jir.12021