Emotional Processing in Down Syndrome

In addition to mental retardation, Down Syndrome (DS) children present emotional deficits. Some authors have suggested that the emotional deficits observed in DS can be related to developmental changes. However, the link between emotion and cognitive processing remains unclear.This study aims to assess the relationships between emotional and cognitive processing in DS children. More specifically, we wanted to assess whether cognitive development could predict emotional deficits. Eighteen children DS and 18 chronological age-matched (CA) children were presented with emotional tasks designed to tap their abilities (i) to label emotion through emotional faces and prosody, (ii) to attribute, from stories, cognitive and emotional states to characters and (iii) to process face identity and gaze behaviour. Cognitive functioning was assessed including attentional treatment, visuo-spatial working memory, receptive language and logical reasoning. The results confirmed that DS performed worse on both cognitive and emotional tasks than CA children. There are also strong correlations between cognitive (including language and logical reasoning measures) and emotional measures. These results suggest that emotional troubles in DS are related to their global cognitive development; they also suggest that the degree of mental retardation can predict the importance of emotional deficits in DS.