Tracking Subtle Stereotypes of Children with Trisomy 21: From Facial-Feature-Based to Implicit Stereotyping

Background: Stigmatization is one of the greatest obstacles to the successful integration of people with Trisomy 21 (T21 or Down syndrome), the most frequent genetic disorder associated with intellectual disability. Research on attitudes and stereotypes toward these people still focuses on explicit measures subjected to social-desirability biases, and neglects how variability in facial stigmata influences attitudes and stereotyping. Methodology/Principal Findings: The participants were 165 adults including 55 young adult students, 55 non-student adults, and 55 professional caregivers working with intellectually disabled persons. They were faced with implicit association tests (IAT), a well-known technique whereby response latency is used to capture the relative strength with which some groups of people—here photographed faces of typically developing children and children with T21—are automatically (without conscious awareness) associated with positive versus negative attributes in memory. Each participant also rated the same photographed faces (consciously accessible evaluations). We provide the first evidence that the positive bias typically found in explicit judgments of children with T21 is smaller for those whose facial features are highly characteristic of this disorder, compared to their counterparts with less distinctive features and to typically developing children. We also show that this bias can coexist with negative evaluations at the implicit level (with large effect sizes), even among professional caregivers

Prevalence of Mental, Behavioural, and Neurobehavioural Disorders

Individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) are known to be at high risk of developing a comorbid mental or behavioural disorder. However, there has only recently been an increased focus on the epidemiology of such disorders in the older population of people with IDD. Attempting to precisely quantify the prevalence and incidence of disorders in this cohort remain difficult, due to complications associated with diverse sampling methodologies, differing definitions of ‘older’, and variations in diagnostic criteria. Nonetheless, the expanding research base since the 1980s indicates that mental and behavioural disorders occur at higher rates among older people with IDD when compared to their mainstream peers. The prevalence of mental disorders for the older cohort tends to decrease in relation to the severity of the intellectual disability, but the reverse is true for behavioural disorders. Estimated prevalence rates for mental disorders vary considerably, but many studies report rates in the 20–30% range, which is higher than for the general community. Behavioural disorders are also very common in older people with IDD but are again hard to quantify precisely. Observed differences in prevalence between people with IDD and the general community may diminish over the age of 70 as dementias become more commonplace in both populations. Finally, some research indicates a greater likelihood of mental disorder amongst the older female population of people with IDD