Technology for supporting emotion regulation of individuals with developmental disabilities: A scoping review.

BACKGROUND: Emotional competencies are skills necessary to adequately understand, express, and regulate emotional phenomena. Among the emotional competencies is emotion regulation. Not having adequate development of this emotional competence is related to psychological problems such as depression. One of the characteristics of individuals with developmental disabilities is the presence of difficulties with emotion regulation. These difficulties can affect an individual's autonomy, social competence, and the development of independent life. AIMS: This paper presents a scoping review to identify the technology designed and developed to support the emotion regulation of individuals with developmental disabilities. METHODS AND PROCEDURES: We combined the guidelines for a systematic literature review in computer science and the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) methodology. The process resulted in twelve stages through which we conducted this scoping review. First, a search query was defined and executed in computer science's five most representative search engines. We used different inclusion, exclusion, and quality criteria for selecting the works included in this review. OUTCOMES AND RESULTS: Thirty-nine papers aimed at supporting the emotional competencies of individuals with developmental disabilities were included, of which nine support emotion regulation. As a result, different areas of opportunity in developing technology to support the emotion regulation of individuals with developmental disabilities are discussed. CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS: Technology supporting emotion regulation in individuals with developmental disabilities is a growing but little-explored field. For the literature supporting emotion regulation, we detected opportunities for study. Some of them aimed at investigating whether we could use technologies developed for other emotional competencies to support emotion regulation and how the characteristics of this technology can support individuals with developmental disabilities.

The Neurobehavioral Effects of Buprenorphine and Meloxicam on a Blast-Induced Traumatic Brain Injury Model in the Rat.

Previous findings have indicated that pain relieving medications such as opioids and non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) may be neuroprotective after traumatic brain injury in rodents, but only limited studies have been performed in a blast-induced traumatic brain injury (bTBI) model. In addition, many pre-clinical TBI studies performed in rodents did not use analgesics due to the possibility of neuroprotection or other changes in cognitive, behavioral, and pathology outcomes. To examine this in a pre-clinical setting, we examined the neurobehavioral changes in rats given a single pre-blast dose of meloxicam, buprenorphine, or no pain relieving medication and exposed to tightly-coupled repeated blasts in an advanced blast simulator and evaluated neurobehavioral functions up to 28 days post-blast. A 16.7% mortality rate was recorded in the rats treated with buprenorphine, which might be attributed to the physiologically depressive side effects of buprenorphine in combination with isoflurane anesthesia and acute brain injury. Rats given buprenorphine, but not meloxicam, took more time to recover from the isoflurane anesthesia given just before blast. We found that treatment with meloxicam protected repeated blast-exposed rats from vestibulomotor dysfunctions up to day 14, but by day 28 the protective effects had receded. Both pain relieving medications seemed to promote short-term memory deficits in blast-exposed animals, whereas vehicle-treated blast-exposed animals showed only a non-significant trend toward worsening short-term memory by day 27. Open field exploratory behavior results showed that blast exposed rats treated with meloxicam engaged in significantly more locomotor activities and possibly a lesser degree of responses thought to reflect anxiety and depressive-like behaviors than any of the other groups. Rats treated with analgesics to alleviate possible pain from the blast ate more than their counterparts that were not treated with analgesics, which supports that both analgesics were effective in alleviating some of the discomfort that these rats potentially experienced post-blast injury. These results suggest that meloxicam and, to a lesser extent buprenorphine alter a variety of neurobehavioral functions in a rat bTBI model and, because of their impact on these neurobehavioral changes, may be less than ideal analgesic agents for pre-clinical studies evaluating these neurobehavioral responses after TBI.