Negative life events predict performance on an executive function task in young adults with developmental disabilities.
Bad life events stack up and measurably slow thinking speed in young adults with developmental disabilities.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team asked 30 young adults with developmental disabilities to press a key when the middle arrow pointed left or right.
Arrows on either side sometimes pointed the same way and sometimes the opposite way.
While the adults played, the team also counted how many bad life events each person had faced in the past year.
What they found
More bad events meant slower button presses.
The adults who had piled-up stress took longer to pick the correct direction.
Even after ruling out IQ and age, life stress still hurt their speed.
How this fits with other research
DeRoma et al. (2004) and Koegel et al. (2014) already showed that adults with developmental disabilities get more angry or sad after bad events.
Day et al. (2021) found the same pattern in young adults with autism.
The new twist: stress does not only change mood; it also slows thinking speed.
Together the studies form a line: life events first hit emotions, then leak into how fast the brain can act.
Why it matters
If a client looks spaced-out or slow, ask what happened at home last month.
A death, move, or staff change could be dulling their focus right now.
You can’t erase the event, but you can give extra prompts, shorter tasks, or breaks until the stress load drops.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
BACKGROUND: Recent research with typically developing children indicates that chronic stress can be detrimental to the development of executive function. This study extends this work to individuals with developmental disabilities and examines the longitudinal relationship between an indicator of chronic stress, negative life events, and performance on a task of executive function within a group of 30 individuals with early identified developmental disabilities. METHODS: Multilevel modelling was used to analyse the relationship between cumulative negative life events and response time on a Flanker task. RESULTS: As hypothesized, individuals who had experienced more cumulative negative life events in their families demonstrated longer response time, an indicator of less efficient executive function. CONCLUSIONS: The association between cumulative negative life events and executive function for children with developmental disabilities suggests the prominent role of the environment for development in this domain. These findings also suggest the importance of providing services, resources, and interventions that will help families adaptively cope with stressful circumstances.
Journal of intellectual disability research : JIDR, 2015 · doi:10.1111/jir.12181