Emotion Recognition in Adolescents with Down Syndrome: A Nonverbal Approach.

Régis Pochon,Claire Touchet,Laure Ibernon

doi:10.3390/brainsci7060055

Abstract

Several studies have reported that persons with Down syndrome (DS) have difficulties recognizing emotions; however, there is insufficient research to prove that a deficit of emotional knowledge exists in DS. The aim of this study was to evaluate the recognition of emotional facial expressions without making use of emotional vocabulary, given the language problems known to be associated with this syndrome. The ability to recognize six emotions was assessed in 24 adolescents with DS. Their performance was compared to that of 24 typically developing children with the same nonverbal-developmental age, as assessed by Raven’s Progressive Matrices. Analysis of the results revealed no global difference; only marginal differences in the recognition of different emotions appeared. Study of the developmental trajectories revealed a developmental difference: the nonverbal reasoning level assessed by Raven’s matrices did not predict success on the experimental tasks in the DS group, contrary to the typically developing group. These results do not corroborate the hypothesis that there is an emotional knowledge deficit in DS and emphasize the importance of using dynamic, strictly nonverbal tasks in populations with language disorders.

Highlights

Knowing how to correctly identify the emotion expressed by someone else’s face is an essential capacity for the proper development of interpersonal relationships during childhood [1,2]
The results were analyzed with two approaches: first, the individual matching method in which an analysis ofresults variance (ANOVA)
Emotion recognition: firstsecond for all method emotions and forofeach separately, developmental trajectories related to emotion recognition: first for all emotions and for each with reference to typical data obtained from children aged 3 to 10

Summary

Introduction

Knowing how to correctly identify the emotion expressed by someone else’s face is an essential capacity for the proper development of interpersonal relationships during childhood [1,2] This capacity is an emotional competency; such competencies allow for smooth adjustment in social interactions. Emotion-understanding deficits can create social adaptation problems, complicate integration into the school environment, and may compromise academic success [3]. This developmental domain has been examined by many studies of people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and to a lesser degree in people with intellectual disabilities (ID). The main idea underlying this approach is that a better understanding of pathologies, differences in developmental trajectories, makes it possible to better target preventive, educational or therapeutic interventions

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