Recognizing primary emotions in communication in adults with intellectual disability

Abstract

The ability to recognize emotions helps people understand social situations and plan their own behavior in specific social contexts. Paralinguistic segments of communication (facial expression and prosodic characteristics) significantly contribute to drawing conclusions on the speaker's emotions, and according to some authors, they are considered even more dominant and more reliable than linguistic segments in decoding emotions tasks. The aim of this paper was to determine the ability to recognize primary emotions in communication with the help of paralinguistic indicators, in adults with mild and moderate intellectual disability. The sample consisted of 60 adult participants with mild (N=25) and moderate (N=35) intellectual disability, equal with regard to gender and type of housing. The participants with mild intellectual disability were aged 20-55 (M=31.24; SD=8.84), while those with moderate intellectual disability were 22-55 years of age (M=34.17; SD=8.76). The Assessment Battery for Communication, ABaCo, (Sacco et al., 2008) was used for assessing the ability to understand emotions in communication. The obtained results showed that adults with intellectual disability experienced most difficulties in detecting fear. By applying the T test for independent samples, it was determined that there were no statistically significant differences between men and women both with mild and moderate ID with regard to their ability to recognize emotions (p>0,05). With regard to the type of housing, statistically significant differences were obtained only in the group of participants with moderate intellectual disability in detecting fear (t (33)=-3.51; p=0.01), in favor of those who lived in institutions. The length of living in an institution positively and moderately correlated with the ability to recognize anger in adults with intellectual disability (r=0.46, p<0.05).