The Effects of Training on Emotion Recognition Skills for Adults with an Intellectual Disability
People with intellectual disabilities have long been associated with having a poor recognition of emotion from facial and other cues. It has been suggested that intervention by social skills training may improve their abilities (McAlpine et al., 1991). This proposition is investigated here. Participants were shown video clips depicting five common emotional states and their ability to label each was recorded. A comparison task of a similar nature but not involving emotion recognition was also used. Participants were matched on their British Picture Vocabulary Scale (BPVS) scores and randomly assigned to experimental or control groups. The experimental group received two training sessions using similar video clips. Finally both groups were re-tested on the original clips. Using a two-way, between-subjects analysis of covariance, a significant improvement with training was found for the emotion-recognition task (F (1,5) = 0.79, p 0.05). A significant correlation (r = 0.755) was noted between the BPVS scores and subjects' pre-intervention scores on the emotion-recognition task.