4.4. Conclusions and future research
The results of this study have implications in terms of informing the methodology of future interventions designed to
improve the emotion recognition skills of people with ID. For example, our work suggests that if images are being used,
including more emotionally relevant context may be helpful, e.g. people looking happy at a wedding. Likewise, initially
reducing the tasks demands, such as asking individuals to pick a target emotion from a choice of two, may lead to more early
success and sustain interest and motivation. It is also possible to prime participants to use either global or local processing to
respond to stimuli (Navon, 1977). Priming, or cueing participants to respond in a specific way has been shown to enhance
accuracy in facial recognition, when the response elicited matches the precedence of the image (Perfect, Weston, Dennis, &
Snell, 2008). Thus an intervention that primed individuals with ID to focus on more global features of facial emotion, may
result in more accurate emotion recognition. The extent to which any improvements would generalise to the more
ecologically valid task of recognising emotions from all available cues, including movement and context, is, however,
unknown.
In conclusion, adults with ID demonstrated relative impairment on tasks of facial emotion recognition when compared
with a child control group, after controlling for residual differences in age and gender. This finding provides some support for
the emotion specificity hypothesis (Rojahn, Rabold, et al., 1995). The study also found that having a more local processing
style predicted poorer performance at emotion recognition, irrespective of group.