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 sugg ested that intervention by social skills training may improve their abiliti es (McAlpine et al.,1991). This proposition is investigated here. Participa nts 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 matc hed on their British Picture Vocabulary Scale (BPVS) scores and randomly as signed to experimental or control groups. The experimental group received t wo training sessions using similar video clips. Finally both groups were re -tested on the original clips. Using a two-way, between-subjects analysis o f covariance, a significant improvement with training was found for the emo tion-recognition task (F (1,5) = 0.79, p < 0.01). A non-significant increas e was recorded for the comparison task (F (1,5) = 1.57, p > 0.05). A signif icant correlation (r = 0.755) was noted between the BPVS scores and subject s' pre-intervention scores on the emotion-recognition task.