The consistency of reports about feelings and emotions from people with intellectual disability.

The team asked 67 adults with mild or moderate intellectual disability to fill out three kinds of forms.

The forms were standard anxiety, depression, and personality scales already used with the general public.

Each person met with a researcher twice, one week apart, to see if their answers stayed the same.

People’s scores matched well across the two visits.

This means the adults could report their own feelings in a steady, reliable way.

The scales showed convergent validity—scores rose and fell together as expected.

Kooijmans et al. (2024) now supersedes this work. They simplified the wording and layout and got even closer agreement with caregiver reports.

Repp et al. (1992) seemed to disagree: their subjects failed a facial-emotion matching test. The clash fades when you see that reading faces is harder than talking about your own mood.

Lindsay et al. (2004) extends the idea to teenagers, showing the same reliability with a new 12-item mood scale.

Meyns et al. (2012) and Vos et al. (2013) extend the agenda further, validating heart-rate and skin signals for clients with severe or profound ID who cannot speak.

You no longer need to guess how clients with mild or moderate ID feel—just ask them. Use the same anxiety or depression scales you already know, and trust the numbers. If you want even cleaner data, borrow the simplified formats from Kooijmans et al. (2024). For non-verbal clients, add cheap pulse-ox or temperature checks as shown by Meyns et al. (2012). Start with self-report, then layer on physiology, and you will capture emotion across the whole severity range.