Social awareness of children with mild intellectual disability

Social development has a significant influence on the quality of social life and is therefore very important part of every child’s raising process. Not only being able to properly interact with others, to actively cooperate in different social activities and to understand others intentions in different social situations, but also to be appropriately included in society are some of the most important skills that contribute to child`s social growth and clearly increase the quality of his life. The lack of social skills is very often observed when considering children with mild intellectual disabilities, mostly due to the limitations in their cognitive and adaptive functioning, resulting mostly in bad social awareness. Further on, some difficulties in social adaptation and functioning are often observed when children with mild intellectual disabilities are exposed to different social situations, especially when building and maintaining social relationships. This can also result in emotional and behavioural problems, usually connected with lack of problem-solving skills and difficulties when trying to appropriately interpret social situations. By taking into consideration all of the represented facts that have an important impact on child’s successful social relationship with their peers, social information processing test has been evaluated. The main purpose of this study was to examine typical generated responses of children with mild intellectual disabilities in different hypothetical social situations and compare the obtained results with results of their typically developing peers. 69 children participated in the study (38 children with mild intellectual disabilities, 31 typically developing children). Their encoding of cues in hypothetical problematic social situations, problem-solving skills and their response generation on represented problems were measured. The results obtained from statistical data analysis show important difference between our groups. The results confirm that children with mild intellectual disabilities, included in our study, had more difficulties with encoding of social cues and their social problem-solving skills are less adequate. They spontaneously generated more aggressive and submissive responses and fewer assertive than their typically developing peers. Results, obtained from the test, clearly show that social skills and social information processing of children with mild intellectual disabilities are not well developed