Exploring different aspects of emotion understanding in adults with Down Syndrome

Abstract

Background: Adults with Down Syndrome (DS) present difficulties in emotion understanding, although research has mainly focused on emotion recognition (external aspects), and little is known about their performance in other complex components (mental and reflective aspects).

Aims: This study aims to examine different aspects of emotion understanding in adults with DS, including a codification of their error pattern, and also to determine the association with other variables that are commonly impaired in adults with DS.

Methods and procedures: Twenty-two adults with DS and twenty-two children with typical development (TD) matched for vocabulary level were assessed with the Test of Emotion Comprehension (TEC), along with other non-verbal reasoning (NVR), structural language and working memory (WM) tasks.

Outcomes and results: Adults with DS showed lower emotion competence than children with TD in different components of the TEC, and also a different pattern of errors was observed. Structural language, NVR and WM predicted distinct emotion understanding skills in different ways.

Conclusions and implications: It is important to plan interventions aimed at improving particular aspects of emotion understanding skills for adults with DS, taking into account the different components, the type of error and the different cognitive and linguistic skills involved in each emotion understanding skill.

Keywords: Adults; Down Syndrome; Emotion understanding; Non-verbal reasoning; Structural language; Working memory.