Awareness Towards Intervention for Individuals With Intellectual Disability

Intellectual disability is sub-average intellectual functioning with impaired adaptive functioning. The limitations in their adaptive skill hampers the ability to cope with stressful life events. There are many issues which require attention while dealing with them like parental level, peer groups, schools, presence of comorbid conditions, etc. Interventions at right stage under efficient supervision can lead to healthy and smooth functioning of cases with ID and with good outcomes. Difficulties like lack of human resources, quality training of clinical psychologists in India, scarcity of effective clinical guidelines, conflicts among the team approach, acceptance in the family and society requires attention in current scenario. There are many things that can be offered but what we need is their acceptance in our society and awareness towards Intervention. This chapter aims at acknowledging these issues to create awareness amongst the responsible caregivers. Timely recognition of treatable causes of intellectual disability can be very rewarding and prevent a lifelong disability.

An Improvement of Robot Stiffness-Adaptive Skill Primitive Generalization Using the Surface Electromyography in Human–Robot Collaboration

Learning from Demonstration in robotics has proved its efficiency in robot skill learning. The generalization goals of most skill expression models in real scenarios are specified by humans or associated with other perceptual data. Our proposed framework using the Probabilistic Movement Primitives (ProMPs) modeling to resolve the shortcomings of the previous research works; the coupling between stiffness and motion is inherently established in a single model. Such a framework can request a small amount of incomplete observation data to infer the entire skill primitive. It can be used as an intuitive generalization command sending tool to achieve collaboration between humans and robots with human-like stiffness modulation strategies on either side. Experiments (human–robot hand-over, object matching, pick-and-place) were conducted to prove the effectiveness of the work. Myo armband and Leap motion camera are used as surface electromyography (sEMG) signal and motion capture sensors respective in the experiments. Also, the experiments show that the proposed framework strengthened the ability to distinguish actions with similar movements under observation noise by introducing the sEMG signal into the ProMP model. The usage of the mixture model brings possibilities in achieving automation of multiple collaborative tasks.

Influence of siblings on adaptive behavior trajectories in autism spectrum disorder

Siblings play an important role in shaping the developmental trajectories of individuals with autism spectrum disorder. Having siblings has been associated with better social communication, non-verbal communication, and theory of mind abilities in autism spectrum disorder. However, little is known about the impact of siblings on adaptive skill growth over time, even though adaptive behavior competencies are among the strongest predictors of positive outcomes in autism spectrum disorder. This study examined the influence of sibling constellation factors, including the presence of siblings, position in birth order, gender of closest-age sibling, and gender match of sibling dyad on the adaptive behavior trajectories of individuals with autism spectrum disorder and non-spectrum disorders from ages 9 to 26 years. Participants with one or more siblings experienced faster growth rates in adaptive behavior from childhood to adulthood than participants without siblings across both Black and White participants, although effects were magnified in Black participants. Furthermore, among participants with siblings, those with male closest-age siblings and those with gender-matched siblings, irrespective of birth order, demonstrated the steepest adaptive skill growth within their respective groups over the 17-year period. Results suggest that siblings may serve an important role in improving the adaptive functioning trajectories and overall outcomes of individuals with autism spectrum disorder. Lay abstract Siblings have the potential to shape the developmental trajectories of individuals with autism spectrum disorder. Having siblings has been associated with better social communication skills, less severe non-verbal communication deficits, and improved theory of mind abilities in autism spectrum disorder. This study examined the influence of the presence of a sibling, participant’s position in the birth order, gender of the closest-age sibling, and gender match of the sibling dyad on the rate of growth in adaptive skills from ages 9 to 26 years among individuals with autism spectrum disorder and individuals with a history of non-spectrum developmental disorders. While all participants showed consistent gains in adaptive skill development as a function of age, there was variability in rates of growth based on sibling constellation group membership. Participants with at least one sibling, regardless of other sibling constellation factors, experienced greater rates of growth in adaptive behavior trajectories from childhood to adulthood than participants with no siblings across both Black and White participants, although differences were magnified in Black participants. Furthermore, among participants with siblings, those with male closest-age siblings and those with gender-matched siblings, irrespective of birth order position, demonstrated the steepest growth patterns in adaptive functioning within their respective groups over the 17-year period. Results suggest that siblings may serve an important role in improving the adaptive functioning trajectories and overall outcomes of individuals with autism spectrum disorder.

Awareness Towards Intervention for Individuals With Intellectual Disability

Intellectual disability is sub-average intellectual functioning with impaired adaptive functioning. The limitations in their adaptive skill hampers the ability to cope with stressful life events. There are many issues which require attention while dealing with them like parental level, peer groups, schools, presence of comorbid conditions, etc. Interventions at right stage under efficient supervision can lead to healthy and smooth functioning of cases with ID and with good outcomes. Difficulties like lack of human resources, quality training of clinical psychologists in India, scarcity of effective clinical guidelines, conflicts among the team approach, acceptance in the family and society requires attention in current scenario. There are many things that can be offered but what we need is their acceptance in our society and awareness towards Intervention. This chapter aims at acknowledging these issues to create awareness amongst the responsible caregivers. Timely recognition of treatable causes of intellectual disability can be very rewarding and prevent a lifelong disability.

The Nomological Network of Emotion Recognition Ability

The ability to recognize other people’s emotions from their face, voice, and body (emotion recognition ability, ERA) is crucial to successful functioning in private and professional life. The Geneva Emotion Recognition Test (GERT; Schlegel, Grandjean, & Scherer, 2014 ) is a new instrument to measure ERA in a more ecologically valid way than previous tests. In this article, we report the results of five studies examining the test’s construct validity with a total N of 1,284. We found that the GERT was highly positively correlated with other performance-based tests measuring ERA and emotional intelligence (EI), as well as with cognitive intelligence. GERT scores were also related to higher self-reported empathy, openness, and neuroticism, and to better social adjustment. Furthermore, higher GERT scores were related to lower anxiety, anger expressivity, and alexithymia. In line with previous findings, women scored higher than men and GERT performance declined with increasing age. Taken together, these results provide considerable evidence for the construct validity of the GERT and for ERA as an adaptive skill that likely facilitates better life outcomes.