It has been shown that attention plays an important role in the onset and regulation of emotions, but there are no data on the impact of the severe attention defects, such as those included in some forms of intellectual disability (ID), may affect individuals’ lives. In the population with ID the most frequently used technique to obtain information about emotions is not only observation, but also the study of neurophysiology which seems to provide useful data. Dr. Pieter Vos and his collaborators at the University of Leuven in Belgium have recently investigated the attention responses to emotional stimuli in a sample of 27 people with severe and profound ID. For the participants were provided 4 positive and 4 negative stimuli, selected from those indicated by nursing staff. The administration procedures were videotaped in order to subsequently evaluate with high degree of accuracy the attention reaction. The heart rate was measured during the exposure to the stimulus. Contrary to expectations, the level of care was higher in response to negative emotional stimuli, but only in the first few seconds of exposure. No differences were found between the negative and positive stimuli between the fourth and sixth seconds of exposure while after the sixth second attention was even lower in response to negative stimuli. The conclusion is in line with Gross's theory of emotion regulation about a decade ago, according to which there would exist in each individual a more or less automatic ability to adaptively adapt the emotional response to different situations, to condition affective expressions, when to try and how to express them. These data extend what has already been found by other studies of people with severe ID in the general population: that the orientation of attention is one of the ways by which an individual instinctively rules their emotions. The conclusion is in line with Gross's theory of emotion regulation about a decade ago, according to which there would exist in each individual a more or less automatic ability to adaptively modulate the emotional response to different situations, to influence the affective expressions, and how to express them. Another result of Vos and his colleagues’ study showed, as expected for the general population, a negative relationship between heart rate and attention. The authors conclude that even people with severe and profound ID seem to use attention distribution to regulate their emotions and that they are always dimensionally similar to the general population and show an association between low heart rate and higher levels of attention.
References
- Vos P, De Cock P, Munde V, Neerinckx H, Petry K, Van Den Noortgate W, Maes B. The role of attention in the affective life of people with severe or profound intellectual disabilities. Res Dev Disabil. 2013 Mar;34(3):902-9.
- Vos, P., De Cock, P., Munde, V., Petry, K., Van den Noortgate, W., & Maes, B. (2012).The tell-tale: What do heart rate skin temperature and skin conductance reveal about emotions of people with severe and profound intellectual disabilities? Research in Developmental Disabilities, 33, 1117–1127.
- Gross, J. (2008). Emotion regulation. In M. Lewis, J. M. Haviland-Jones, & L. Feldman Barret (Eds.), Handbook of emotions (3rd ed., pp. 180–195). New York: Guilford Press.