Recognition of subtle and universal facial expressions in a community-based sample of adults classified with intellectual disability.
Adults with mild-moderate ID in the community struggle markedly to read both subtle and basic facial emotions—target this skill in social programmes.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Nijs et al. (2016) visited adults with mild or moderate intellectual disability in their own day programs. They asked each person to name feelings shown in photos of faces. Some faces showed big, clear emotions. Others showed quiet, subtle emotions like a slight frown or soft kindness.
The team also asked participants to pick which story matched the face. This checked if the adults could read both the face and the social cue.
What they found
The adults with ID scored far below adults without disability on every emotion. They missed neutral, compassionate, and angry faces the most. Even happy and sad faces, usually easy, were hard when the expression was slight.
The gap was large and held for both mild and moderate ID levels.
How this fits with other research
Ohan et al. (2015) had already pooled earlier papers and saw the same big deficit. S et al. simply moved the test out of the lab and into real life, showing the problem is just as strong in the community.
Shearn et al. (1997) looks like a contradiction at first. They found that adults with ID who were less depressed and more socially skilled scored higher on emotion tasks. Their result is positive, while S et al. found a negative result. The difference is focus: J et al. looked inside the ID group and saw mood matters; S et al. compared the whole ID group to typical adults and saw the overall gap remains huge. Both can be true.
Older studies like Repp et al. (1992) and Leung et al. (1998) showed the same impairments in lab settings. S et al. updates the story by proving the deficit still rules once people are out in everyday programs.
Why it matters
If you run social-skills groups for adults with ID, do not assume they can read faces. Build in direct teaching of subtle cues like a tight mouth for anger or soft eyes for kindness. Start with clear examples, then fade to slight expressions. Check mood, too—J et al. remind us that depression can make the task even harder. Targeting these micro-skills may help clients keep jobs and friendships in the community.
Want CEUs on This Topic?
The ABA Clubhouse has 60+ free CEUs — live every Wednesday. Ethics, supervision & clinical topics.
Join Free →Add flash cards of slight facial expressions to your emotion lesson and prompt learners to name the feeling before you give the answer.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
BACKGROUND: Across the USA and UK, schemes now exist to aid the successful integration of adults with mild to moderate intellectual disabilities into general society. One factor that may prove important to the success of such schemes is social competence. Here, understanding the facial expressions of others is critical, as emotion recognition is a prerequisite to empathetic responding and an essential factor in social functioning. Yet research in this area is lacking, especially in community-based samples. METHOD: We investigated the performance of 13 adults with mild to moderate intellectual disability (ID), relative to 13 age-matched controls, on three tasks of emotion recognition (emotion categorisation; recognition of valence; and recognition of arousal), using a number of 'basic' (angry and happy) and more 'subtle' (compassionate and critical) emotional expressions, as well as the posers face in a default relaxed (i.e. 'neutral') state. Importantly, the sample was drawn from a community-based initiative and was therefore representative of populations' government schemes target. RESULTS: Across emotion recognition tasks, the ID adults, as compared with controls, were significantly impaired when labelling the emotions displayed by the poser as well as recognising the associated 'feelings' conveyed by these faces. This was especially true for the neutral, compassionate and angry facial expressions. For example, ID adults demonstrated deficits in categorising neutral and subtle emotional expressions, as well as assessing the valence of such facial expressions. In addition, ID adults also struggled to assess arousal levels; especially those associated with compassionate and angry faces. CONCLUSION: Given both basic and subtle emotions are conveyed in a range of daily situations, errors in interpreting such facial expressions and, relatedly, understanding what potential behaviours such expressions signify could contribute to the social difficulties ID adults face. This is important because current initiatives such as 'personalisation' do not appear to have schemes supporting training in this area, and understanding the facial expressions of others is, after all, one of our most important non-verbal social communication tools.
Journal of intellectual disability research : JIDR, 2016 · doi:10.1111/jir.12253