Theory Of Mind And Emotional Understanding Of The Different Mode Of Education For Children With Intellectual Disability Differences

Intellectually disabled children have difficulties with cognition and social interaction. It means they have lower abilities of theory of mind (ToM) and emotional understanding (EU). This research tested the intellectually disabled children and the typically developing children in Xi'an and Taitong by using the typical paradigms of TOM and EU.The topics discussed in this research are as follows:(1) the level of ToM and EU abilities of the intellectually disabled children;(2) the factors which affect the ToM and EU abilities of the intellectually disabled children;(3) the patterns of development of EU of intellectually disabled children;(4) the relationship between ToM and EU abilities.The following is the research content in detail and the conclusions were induced:The first study probed into the difference of ToM and EU abilities between the typically developing children and the intellectually disabled children, it also examined whether the cognition and social deficits of intellectually disabled children are associated with ToM and EU difficulties. The standard ToM and EU tasks were adopted and Two groups of intellectually disabled children participated, group 1 of 50 children from xi'an special education schools and group 2, of 30 intellectually disabled children from Taitong primary schools, 114 typically developing children from a kindergarten in Xi'an were tested with the same tasks as a control group.The results showed that on ToM tasks, typically developing children above the age of five performed better than the experimental groups, Group 1 performed significantly more poorly than group 2. On EU tasks, no differences emerged between group2 and the control group above 5 years old. It suggests that intellectually disabled children do have impairment in ToM and EU. However, closer inspection of the impairment between group 1 and 2 in comparison with the control group revealed quantitative differences in their performance, suggestive of the impact of a proper education.The second study explored the factors which affected the ToM and EU abilities of the intellectually disabled children. The experimental group were tested by using Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC—Ⅲ) which was revised in Chinese mainland and Taiwan respectively. The results suggested a better performance of the group 2 on all subordinate tasks of ToM and EU. The Manova showed the significance of the main effects of education style on ToM tasks but IQ and age didn't reach to the significant level. On EU tasks, an interactive effect of IQ and education style emerged. The simple effect analysis suggested that education affected severe and moderate intellectually disabled children's EU ability.The patterns of development of EU of intellectually disabled children were also discussed in this study. It indicated that the two groups showed the same pattern of emotion naming and recognition: best performance on happiness and worst on surprise.The third study explored the relation between ToM and EU abilities. The result suggested significant correlations among ToM , EU abilities and verbal IQ for both groups. It indicated that verbal cognition explained an important part of the variance of ToM and EU results.