Theory of Mind "emotion", developmental characteristics and social understanding in children and adolescents with intellectual disabilities.
Emotion mind-reading grows on the same timetable in kids with ID as in mental-age peers, so boost their feeling words first.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team compared kids with intellectual disability to typically developing kids.
Both groups were matched on developmental age, not birth age.
They looked at how these children learned to name other people's feelings.
The study tracked the same emotion-based theory-of-mind tasks over time.
What they found
Kids with ID followed the same growth steps as the control kids.
Their verbal thinking scores explained most of the progress.
Delay was present, but the pattern looked normal when matched for mental age.
How this fits with other research
Thirion-Marissiaux et al. (2008) ran the same sample on false-belief tasks.
That paper found kids with ID still lagged behind, so emotion and belief skills do not move together.
Matson et al. (2004) warned that weak language can hide true social thinking; the new data show strong verbal skill lets emotion ToM bloom in ID.
Dahlgren et al. (2010) later showed the same language trap in children who cannot speak clearly.
Why it matters
You can relax a little: emotion perspective-taking will catch up once language is strong.
Focus your teaching plan on building vocabulary for feelings first.
Then move to more complex belief tasks only after language scores rise.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Patterns of development of ToM-emotion abilities in intellectually disabled (ID) children and typically developing (TD) children matched on their developmental age were investigated. The links between cognition, language, social understanding and ToM-emotion abilities were examined. EDEI-R (Perron-Borelli, M. (1996). Echelles Différentielles d'Efficiences Intellectuelles. Forme Révisée (EDEI-R). Paris: Editions et Applications Psychologiques) was used to match participants and to assess social understanding. ECOSSE (Lecocq, P. (1996). L'E.CO.S.SE. Une épreuve de compréhension syntaxico-sémantique. Paris: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion) assessed the level of syntactic and semantic comprehension of French speaking, to ensure a good comprehension of the questions in ToM-emotion tasks. Adapted tasks of the understanding of causes and consequences of emotions (Quintal, G. (2001). La compréhension des émotions chez les enfants d'âge préscolaire dans le cadre d'une théorie de l'esprit. Un-published master's thesis, University of Montreal, Québec) assessed ToM-emotion abilities (Nader-Grosbois, N., Thirion-Marissiaux, A.-F., & Grosbois, M. (2003). Adapted tests for assessment of the Theory of Mind of causes and consequences of emotions (unpublished documents). Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium). Similarities in the development of ToM-emotion abilities and social understanding were found, respectively, in both groups (delay hypothesis in ID participants). Some differences between groups were observed in the links between social understanding and ToM-emotion abilities. Significant correlations between developmental characteristics (verbal and non-verbal cognition) and ToM-emotion abilities were obtained for both groups. Verbal cognition explained an important part of the variance of ToM results (understanding of causes and consequences of emotions). The impact of chronological age on ToM-emotion abilities was also examined and is discussed.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2008 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2007.07.001