Understanding of facial expressions of emotion by children with intellectual disabilities of differing aetiology.
Down syndrome brings a special hitch in reading fear from faces, beyond what mental age predicts.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Neuringer et al. (2007) asked kids to name feelings from faces. They tested three groups: Down syndrome, fragile X, and non-specific ID. Each child was matched to a typically developing peer with the same mental age.
The task showed photos of happy, sad, angry, scared, and surprised faces. Researchers counted how many expressions each child got right.
What they found
Only the Down syndrome group scored lower than their matched peers. Fear was the hardest emotion for them to spot.
Kids with fragile X or non-specific ID did as well as their mental-age mates. The trouble seems tied to Down syndrome itself, not just low IQ.
How this fits with other research
Ohan et al. (2015) reviewed 25 studies and found large emotion-reading deficits across adults with ID. Neuringer et al. (2007) fits this pattern, but shows the problem starts in childhood and is sharpest in Down syndrome.
Repp et al. (1992) used the same matched design and also found lower scores in ID. Their mixed-age sample blurred syndrome differences; G et al. clarified that Down syndrome drives the effect.
Ferreri et al. (2011) tested Prader-Willi syndrome with the same task. Both studies found fear the toughest emotion, hinting at a common pathway in genetic syndromes.
Why it matters
If you teach social skills to kids with Down syndrome, do not assume mental-age matching equals emotion skill. Add extra practice for fear and surprise. Use clear photos, teach look-cues (wide eyes = scared), and give quick feedback. This small tweak can boost peer interaction and reduce problem behavior that stems from misreading faces.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
BACKGROUND: Interpreting emotional expressions is a socio-cognitive skill central to interpersonal interaction. Poor emotion recognition has been reported in autism but is less well understood in other kinds of intellectual disabilities (ID), with procedural differences making comparisons across studies and syndromes difficult. This study aimed to compare directly facial emotion recognition skills in children with fragile X syndrome (FXS), Down's syndrome (DS) and non-specific intellectual disability (NSID), contrasting ability and error profiles with those of typically developing (TD) children of equivalent cognitive and linguistic status. METHODS: Sixty children participated in the study: 15 FXS, 15 DS, 15 NSID and 15 TD children. Standardised measures of cognitive, language and socialisation skills were collected for all children, along with measures of performance on two photo-matching tasks: an 'identity-matching' task (to control for basic face-processing ability) and an 'emotion-matching' task (happiness, sadness, anger, surprise, fear or disgust). RESULTS: Identity-matching ability did not differ across the four child groups. Only the DS group performed significantly more poorly on the emotion-matching task and only in comparison to the TD group, with fear recognition an area of particular difficulty. CONCLUSION: Findings support previous evidence of emotion recognition abilities commensurate with overall developmental level in children with FXS or NSID, but not DS. They also suggest, however, that syndrome-specific difficulties may be subtle and detectable, at least in smaller-scale studies, only in comparison with TD matches, and not always across syndromes. Implications for behavioural phenotype theory, educational interventions and future research are discussed.
Journal of intellectual disability research : JIDR, 2007 · doi:10.1111/j.1365-2788.2006.00947.x