The ability of adults with an intellectual disability to recognise facial expressions of emotion in comparison with typically developing individuals: A systematic review.
Adults with ID show a large, stable deficit in reading facial emotions—screen for it before you write new social goals.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Ohan et al. (2015) looked at every paper they could find on how well adults with intellectual disability read faces. They only kept studies that compared these adults to typically developing adults. In the end they pooled the results to see how big and how steady the gap was.
What they found
The review found one clear story: adults with ID score far below typical adults on every facial-emotion task. The deficit was large and showed up across happy, sad, angry, scared, and neutral faces.
How this fits with other research
The review wraps older single studies like Repp et al. (1992) and Leung et al. (1998) into one big picture. Those early papers already showed the same negative gap, so the 2015 work is a confirmation, not a surprise.
One paper inside the review, Shearn et al. (1997), seems to clash at first. It reports a positive link: within the ID group, adults who were less depressed and more socially skilled did better on emotion tasks. The review keeps this finding; it simply shows that even the "best" performers within the ID group still lag far behind typical adults.
Neuringer et al. (2007) adds a twist the review could not ignore: only children with Down syndrome, not other ID causes, showed extra emotion-recognition trouble. This hints that some aetiologies may need even more intensive teaching, a nuance the broad review cannot give you.
Why it matters
If your social-skills program for adults with ID is moving slowly, check whether clients can read faces. Add quick screens such as matching photos to emotion words. Start with easy happy faces, then build to harder fear and anger. Teaching this one skill can unlock gains in conversation, work, and friendship groups.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
This review systematically examined the literature on the ability of adults with an intellectual disability (ID) to recognise facial expressions of emotion. Studies were included that: recruited only adult participants with ID; that did not specifically recruit participants with co-morbid diagnoses of syndrome(s) related to ID; and that directly compared the performance of adults with ID with a group of people without ID. Nine papers met the eligibility criteria for review and were assessed against pre-defined quality rating criteria and the findings synthesised. The majority of included studies were assessed as being of acceptable overall methodological quality. All of the studies reported a relative impairment in emotion recognition for participants with ID on at least some of the tasks administered, with a large effect size being found for most of the significant results. The review suggests that adults with ID are relatively impaired in recognising facial expressions of emotion, when compared with either adults or children without ID. Methodological variation between studies limits the extent to which any interpretations can be made as to the cause of impaired emotion recognition in adults with ID.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2015 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2015.05.007