Het verband tussen hot en cool executieve functies en sociale informatieverwerking bij licht verstandelijk beperkte kinderen.

Abstract

It has been known that social functioning among children with mild intellectual disabilities can be predicted by the way social information in a social situation has been processed. A theory which is regularly used to describe the individual differences in terms of adaptive or maladaptive social functioning is the Social Information Processing Theory. According to this theory, the way how children encode, interpret cues of a particular social situation (partly) influences how they will generate goals and responds to that same social situation. Furthermore, the theory offers an model (SIP-model) in which the several steps of social information processing are differentiated. The way children process social information is on it’s turn dependent of past experiences and biologically determined capabilities. This research will focus on the influence of the biologically determined capability executive function in combination with specific steps of the SIP-model. Executive functions can be described as multiple psychological processes, headed by the prefrontal cortex, which cooperate in order of problem solving. Based on a relatively new theory, a distinction has been made between two forms of executive functioning; cool executive functions and hot executive functions. Cool executive functions like attention, planning, working-memory and mental flexibility, are used for abstract cognitive problem solving. Hot executive functions like inhibition and following social excepted rules, are used for emotional/motivational decision-making. In this research it has been hypothesised that these different types of executive functions have their unique contributions in social information processing, measured through the SIP-model.