The relations between intellectual disabilities,social information processing,and behaviour problems

Social information processing (SIP) in children with mild intellectual disabilities (MID) has been said to differ from SIP in children without MID. However, findings have been inconsistent and MID have been confounded with behaviour problems. It is not clear whether SIP is uniquely related to intellectual disabilities, to the behaviour problems of children with MID, or to both. In the present study, 56 children with MID and 31 children without MID between the ages of 10 and 14 years therefore completed a number of SIP tasks involving video vignettes and their externalizing behaviour problems were assessed. It was hypothesized that intellectual disabilities would be related to both SIP and behaviour problems. Findings show children with MID to encode more negative cues, generate more responses, and show more variability in their responses than children without MID. Children with MID also generated fewer assertive responses, evaluated assertive responses less positively, were less confident about the enactment of assertive responses, and selected fewer assertive responses than children without MID. Submissive responses were more often generated spontaneously by children with MID, more positively evaluated by them, and given more confidence for enactment by children with MID compared to children without MID. Regression analyses were conducted to assess the relations between SIP, MID, and behaviour problems. Variance in the generation of submissive responses was related to both intellectual disabilities and externalizing behaviour problems. Variance in the encoding of cues, the number of responses generated, the variability of generated responses, the evaluation of assertive and submissive responses, self-efficacy, and the selection of assertive responses was found to be related to intellectual disabilities. Variance in the generation of aggressive responses was related to externalizing behaviour problems. In other words, not responding assertively was related to intellectual disabilities while responding aggressively was related to behaviour problems.