Role of Anxiety as a Trait and State in Youth With Mild Intellectual Disability: Coping With Difficult Situations

Abstract

Although social integration of youths with intellectual disabilities improves their psychological adaptation, it nevertheless exposes them to a higher risk of stress. The author's goal was to verify the regulatory role of anxiety, respectively, as a trait and as a state in youth with mild intellectual disability who are coping with difficult situations. The study, involving a group of 120 students at the Education and Rearing Center in Kielce (Poland), used two psychological methods pertaining to a cognitive paradigm. The first was the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (ISCL-Polish version of STAI) and the other was the self-description technique of the authorship "That's Life," devised with the aim of revealing either task strategies or emotional and avoidant strategies adopted by the respondents. The tools are matched to specific cognitive abilities and social experiences typical of youth with mild intellectual disability. Correlative research model was applied. The results of linear regression and variance analyses showed the regulatory role of the state anxiety for youth with mild intellectual disability with reference to coping strategies. A higher intensity of anxiety stimulated their defensive activity, especially in the context of ambivalent conflicts, whereas a decrease in state anxiety led to their employing task-focused strategies. The results should encourage the development and application of anxiety-reducing techniques based on cognitive confrontation to activate task-oriented coping.

Causal attribution and coping with classmates’ isolation and humiliation in young adults with mild intellectual disability

“…The study suggests that young people with MID declare a wide range of strategies, both antisocial and prosocial, to cope with peers' humiliating or isolating acts. Therefore, the results are in agreement with much dynamic research on coping, emphasizing situational and intra-personal factors of behavior (Cohen-Gazith, 1996;Kurtek, 2016;Leffert et al, 2000). Nevertheless, the findings indicate that humiliation and isolation are mostly interpreted as negative by young people with MID.…”

“One does not forget, it all comes back”: elderly people with intellectual disability review adversities and stress-protection in their lives

“…Prevention of toxic stress further needs the deliberate application of strategies to reduce anxiety (Kurtek, 2016), to change avoiding or passive coping skills into more active ones (Masten and Barnes, 2018;van der Kolk, 2014), and to talk over experiences, such as Life Review and Life Story Work, (group)reminiscence, and (group)psychotherapy. These strategies have been proven useful for people with mild and moderate intellectual disability (Bai et al, 2014;Barber et al, 2000;Hamilton and Atkinson, 2009;Meininger, 2006;Van Puyenbroeck and Maes, 2009), and, as our focus group method shows, need not be difficult to execute.…”

The relation between social anxiety and biased interpretations in adolescents with mild intellectual disabilities

“…Therefore, it is still unclear whether socially anxious adolescents with MID interpret ambiguous situations in a negative way comparable to adolescents with an average IQ. There are several studies that concluded that individuals with MID have similar coping strategies during difficult situations as individuals without MID (Da Costa, Larouche, Dritsa, & Brender, 2000;Fanurik, Koh, Schmitz, Harrison, & Conrad, 1999;Kurtek, 2016;Madland, Feinmann, & Newman, 2000). These findings might suggest that similar biases in information processing might also play a role in adolescents with and without MID.…”