The tell-tale: What do heart rate; skin temperature and skin conductance reveal about emotions of people with severe and profound intellectual disabilities?

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• 作者：Pieter Vos^a ; ^{pieter.vos@ppw.kuleuven.be} ; Paul De Cock^b ; Vera Munde^c ; Katja Petry^a ; Wim Van Den Noortgate^d ; Bea Maes^a ; ¹ ; ^{bea.maes@ppw.kuleuven.be}
• 关键词：Severe intellectual disability ; Profound intellectual disability ; PIMD ; ID ; Physiology ; Emotion ; Emotion expression ; Heart rate ; Skin conductance ; Skin temperature ; Observation
• 刊名：Research in Developmental Disabilities
• 出版年：2012
• 期刊代码：234_08914222
• 类别：med
• 出版时间：July-August, 2012
• 卷：33
• 期：4
• 页码：1117-1127
• 文件大小：264 K

摘要

Identifying emotions in people with severe and profound intellectual disabilities is a difficult challenge. Since self-reports are not available, behaviour is the most used source of information. Given the limitations and caveats associated with using behaviour as the sole source of information about their emotions, it is important to supplement behavioural information with information from another source. As it is accepted that emotions consist of language, behaviour and physiology, in this article we investigated if physiology could give information about the emotions of people with severe and profound intellectual disabilities. To this aim we tested hypotheses derived from the motivational model of about the relation between heart rate and the valence of emotions and between heart rate, skin conductance and skin temperature and behavioural expressions of emotions of people with severe and profound intellectual disability. We presented 27 participants with 4 staff-selected negative and 4 staff-selected positive stimuli. The situations were videotaped and their heart rate, skin conductance and skin temperature was measured. Each behaviour of the participant was coded using the observational method developed by . As hypothesized, we found a lower heart rate when participants were presented with negative stimuli than when they were presented with positive stimuli in the first 6 s of stimuli presentation. Their skin temperature was higher for the expression of low intensity negative emotions compared to the expression of low intensity positive emotions. The results suggest that, as with people without disability, heart rate and skin temperature can give information about the emotions of persons with severe and profound ID.