Attachment behaviours in adults with intellectual disabilities in assisted living facilities: representations from direct-care staff.

BACKGROUND: Studies on individuals with intellectual disabilities (IDs) indicate that primary care staff are potential attachment figures. Therefore, the ability to interpret and respond to attachment behaviours with sensitivity is crucial for professionals working with adults with IDs. However, little is known regarding representations and understanding of these attachment behaviours among professionals. This study investigated the representations of attachment behaviours among adults with IDs, as observed and interpreted by direct-care staff in assisted living facilities. METHODS: Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 19 support workers in seven assisted living facilities in the French community of Belgium. A thematic content analysis was performed. RESULTS: Professional discourse elicited various forms of attachment behaviours that were sometimes considered challenging. Staff reported difficulties in finding a balance between supporting selective attachment and maintaining 'the right distance' to prevent a negative impact on their work conditions. CONCLUSIONS: This study gives insight to how using an attachment-informed framework may provide a new perspective on behaviours of adults with IDs in assisted living facilities, as well as the need to offer professionals the opportunity to reflect upon their practices in relation to this dimension.

Differences related to aging in sensorimotor knowledge: Investigation of perceptual strength and body object interaction.

Embodied approach postulates that knowledge and conceptual representations are grounded in action and perception. In order to investigate the involvement of sensorimotor information in conceptual and cognitive processing, researchers have collected various norms in young adults. For instance, the perceptual strength (PS) assesses perceptual experience (i.e. visual, auditory, haptic, gustatory, olfactory) associated with a concept and the body-object-interaction (BOI) assesses the ease with which a human body can interact with the referent of a word. The importance of both BOI and PS in the multimodal composition of word meaning is today well recognized. However, given the sensorimotor development of the individual from childhood to later life, it is likely that different age periods are associated with different perceptual experience and capacity to interact with objects. The purpose of this research is to investigate exploratory the effect of age on PS and BOI by comparing the evaluation of 270 French language words by young adults and healthy older people. The results showed that older adults presented similar or even higher PS for some modalities (e.g. gustatory and olfactory) and in particular for certain categories of words, while the BOI decreases. In addition to the importance of adjusting the verbal stimuli used in aging studies when dealing with multimodal representations, our results will lead us to discuss the evolution of sensorimotor representations with age.