Affective learning in adults with intellectual disability: an experiment using evaluative conditioning

Establishing the transdiagnostic contextual pathways of emotional outbursts

Emotional outbursts or temper outbursts are challenging behaviours commonly experienced by people with neurodevelopmental disorders and people who have experienced childhood adversity, which can negatively impact individuals and their families. Emotional outbursts may manifest in different situations via unique pathways distinguished by context-specific differences in the regulation and expression of emotions. Caregivers (N = 268) of young people (6-25 years) with emotional outbursts completed a bespoke caregiver-report questionnaire. Potential pathways were identified by examining the patterns of antecedents and setting events related to outbursts through factor and cluster analyses. Six contextual factors were derived from the Emotional Outburst Questionnaire. Based on these factors, the responses were classified into three clusters, which may represent potential pathways of emotional outbursts. The three clusters were characterized by the increased likelihood of outbursts: (1) across all setting events and triggers; (2) in safe setting events; (3) in unsafe setting events. These potential pathways may be related to: (1) differences in sensory processing; (2) masking of emotions in unsafe environments; (3) differences in safety perception. This framework supports a transdiagnostic account of emotional outbursts and may facilitate the development of pathway-specific intervention strategies.

Identification of emotions and physiological response in individuals with moderate intellectual disability

According to Ekman's model, the basic emotions are anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise. These emotions are universal and have an adaptative function. However, studies on these emotions among individuals with moderate intellectual disability (MID) are limited, mainly owing to issues in sample size and sample homogeneity. The present study aimed to explore differences between a MID group (n = 10) and a non-MID control group (n = 10) in 1) the identification of basic emotions; and 2) the physiological response with images related to fear, happiness, sadness, anger, and disgust, as well as images with neutral and sexual content. A total of 29 images from The International Affective Picture System and a biofeedback measurement system were used. The results showed no statistically significant differences in the identification of the basic emotions of fear, sadness, and disgust. However, statistically significant differences were found for happiness (p = .008), anger (p = .02), and neutral images (p = .02), and minor statistically significant differences were found for images with sexual content (p < .01) in MID individuals with respect to the control group. The MID group's physiological response was lower compared with the control group, with statistically significant differences for all emotional visual stimuli. This preliminary study showed important and interesting results for the study of emotions and sexuality in MID. Future studies should consider the sample size, sex and age comparisons, and the different levels of intellectual disability.