The role of attention in the affective life of people with severe or profound intellectual disabilities.
Adults with severe ID can calm themselves by looking away from negative pictures, especially when their heart rate is low.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Marchal et al. (2013) watched adults with severe or profound intellectual disability look at happy and angry faces. They tracked eye gaze and heart rate second-by-second for ten seconds.
The team wanted to know if these clients could shift their own attention away from upsetting pictures to feel better.
What they found
During the first six seconds clients looked equally at happy and angry faces. After six seconds they looked away from the angry ones.
Lower heart rate predicted who could look away. The move away from negative pictures is a simple form of emotion regulation.
How this fits with other research
Oka et al. (2008) showed that people with mild–moderate ID split attention between two tasks the same way as peers. Pieter’s group shows that even people with more severe ID still control where they look when feelings are involved.
Edwards et al. (2007) taught adults with moderate ID to shift attention to their feet to cut aggression. Pieter’s finding supports that idea: moving eyes away from upsetting input can calm the body.
Angulo-Chavira et al. (2017) saw bigger pupil dilation in Down syndrome during attention tasks, hinting at extra effort. Pieter adds heart-rate data, showing that calmer bodies help the shift away from negative sights.
Why it matters
If a client with severe ID is staring at a loud peer, give them something positive to look at after a few seconds. Watch for a slower heart rate—that is the moment they can turn away. No extra software or drills are needed; you just arrange the visual world and wait for the calm.
Want CEUs on This Topic?
The ABA Clubhouse has 60+ free CEUs — live every Wednesday. Ethics, supervision & clinical topics.
Join Free →After six seconds of upset staring, silently place a preferred visual item at eye level and angle the chair toward it.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
Although it is shown that attention plays an important role both in the onset and in the regulation of emotions in people without disabilities there is no information about how attention is related to emotions in people with severe or profound intellectual disability (ID). Therefore, in our study, we investigated the role of attention in the onset and regulation of the emotions of persons with severe or profound ID. We presented 27 participants with 4 staff-selected negative and 4 staff-selected positive stimuli. The situations were videotaped and their heart rate and attention was measured. Contrary to the expected higher attention to negative stimuli during the onset of negative emotions, we did not find differences in attention in the fourth to sixth second of stimulus presentation. However, in support of the emotion regulation theory of Gross (2008) we did find less attention to the negative stimuli than to the positive stimuli after these first 6s of stimuli presentation. As expected from research in people without disabilities, there was also a negative relationship between the heart rate and the probability of being attentive. Our results suggest that people with severe and profound ID use attentional deployment to regulate their emotions and that, as in people without disabilities, a low heart rate is associated with attention.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2013 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2012.11.013