Van Nieuwenhuijzen & Vriens (2012). (Social) Cognitive skills and social information processing in children with mild to borderline intellectual disabilities. – Article summary

Children with mild to borderline intellectual disabilities (MBID) have problems with adaptive functioning in social situations and in peer relations. They are rejected more often and have problems building social relations. They show more aggressive behaviour, partially because of the lack of adequate social skills. Comorbidity is also common in MBID. Youth with MBID is overrepresented in the criminal justice system.

To show socially adaptive behaviour, complex social skills are needed. Adaptive social behaviour depends on social information processing (SIP). This refers to the way social information is encoded (1), behaviour of others is interpreted (2), own emotions are regulated (3), responses to the problem situation are generated, selected and enacted (4). Youth with MBID typically encode more negative information (1), have less assertive but more submissive problem solving skills (2) and have more aggressive problem solving skills (3).

Cognitive limitations may explain differences in SIP. Selective attention (1), working memory (2) and inhibition (3) may be the most important skills for SIP. Social cognitive skills such as perspective taking (1), emotion recognition (2), interpretation of emotional facial expressions (3) and the understanding and interpretation of social situations in general (4) are important conditions to be able to process social information adequately. Intent attribution depends on the interpretation of emotional facial expression.

People with MBID may be at higher risk for inadequate interpretation of others intentions and have inadequate SIP as a result of their problems with recognizing emotions.

There are several conclusions:

• Working memory and emotion recognition skills predict the encoding of interpretation and emotional cues.
• Inhibition predict hostile intent attributions.
• Emotion recognition predicts the size of the repertoire of generated responses.
• Interpretation skills predict the number of aggressive and submissive responses.
• Emotion recognition and interpretation skills predict selection of assertive skills (i.e. poor skills predict submissive responses).

Working memory (1), emotion recognition (2) and interpretation (3) have unique contributions to social information processing. Working memory (1), perspective taking (2) and emotion recognition (3) have unique contributions to variance in encoding cues.

Cognitive skills predict social information processing in children with MBID, especially emotion recognition and interpretation skills. Emotion recognition and working memory skills help children to encode information more thoroughly.