Personality and Motivational Differences in Persons With Mental Retardation

Harvey N. Switzky, Harvey N. Switzky

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2001
• ISBN:
  9781135685805
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

This book presents the most comprehensive review of research regarding personality and motivational differences in persons with mental retardation. From the personal commentary of Edward Zigler, H. Carl Haywood, and Harvey N. Switzky, the book summarizes the classical work of the Yale and Peabody-Vanderbilt School over the last 40 years. A sampling of new directions in research is provided, including work on self-determination theory and practice; decision making; direct and indirect effects of genetic mental retardation syndromes on personality; personality and psychopathology in genetic mental retardation syndromes; a new theory of information processing linking cognition, motivation, and performance; and a sensitivity theory of motivation. This definitive work presents older and evolving newer models and applications to the field in order to demonstrate the power of motivational variables in understanding the behavior of persons with mental retardation. The purpose is to enhance the quality of life in persons with mental retardation and other developmental disabilities.

Part I
Commentary: Perspective and Retrospective

1
Looking Back 40 Years and Still Seeing the Person With Mental Retardation as a Whole Person

Edward Zigler
Yale University

In these pages I share some thoughts about the lessons I learned during 40 years of work in the field of mental retardation. While my principal focus is on the direction the science has taken, a primary lesson is that science is not an isolated enterprise. Over the years, I observed the vicissitudes of American history as they affected the discipline. Looking back, I see that many of the issues and purported solutions emphasized at any particular time represent the swinging of the historical pendulum. The path and speed of the pendulum are directed not only by knowledge derived from the latest scientific research, but also by political, economic, and social forces that have little to do with mental retardation but have a profound impact on professional approaches to it.

From a modern vantage point, the pendulum was launched during the mid-19th century when physicians such as Samuel Howe and Edouard Seguin attempted to treat people with mental retardation with dignity and compassion. Their efforts led to the rise of the residential institution, designed to provide retarded children and adults with education, humane treatment, and understanding in a place where they were valued and could succeed. The gesture that they should be treated “normally” progressed to the thought that they could become “normal.” These hopes were dashed when, despite society’s best efforts, individuals with mental retardation did not become smarter and succeed independently outside of the institutional cocoon. The treatment of retarded people then entered its dark age. Institutions became human warehouses where residents were hidden, neglected, and forgotten.

Parents of retarded children did not forget, however, and they fought for decent care. Their major victory was the passage of the Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975 (the predecessor of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act or IDEA). The Act guaranteed children with intellectual and other handicaps a “free appropriate education” in the “least restrictive environment” and gave their parents clout and rights to assure that their special needs were met. Today, advocates are fighting for—and winning—the rights of individuals with handicaps to be fully included in the mainstream of society, exactly where they started at the beginning of this condensed history..

The science of mental retardation did not lead these changes but merely tagged along. Its growth as a science was, if anything, stymied by the moral and ideological battles surrounding the passage of the IDEA. No one wanted to be on the “wrong” side of the argument, which was based on human and constitutional rights. Recall that the IDEA was shaped by groups of “angry parents” and public officials sympathetic to minorities and other disadvantaged citizens they believed were wronged by segregation, prejudice, and denial of equal opportunities (Trent, 1994). The advocates’ position drew on civil rights and constitutional guarantees, and they defended it in the courts and halls of Congress. Scientists were not invited into the process. In fact, “the validity of the methods and findings of behavioral science [was outwardly] rejected from the standpoint of an intellectual movement” (Jacobson & Mulick, 1996a, p. 3).

As the battle for public education for retarded children gained publicity and popular support, many scientists climbed on the bandwagon. Their endorsements gave the movement a degree of scientific credibility that it did not really deserve. A telling illustration is the push for normalization and deinstitutionalization that quickly gained momentum in the 1970s. Professionals supported these slogans although they had no evidence that these practices were of any benefit. Their enthusiasm drowned out their few colleagues who argued that research was needed to determine if these changes would do more good than harm and that institutions should remain in place until the findings were in (Zigler, 1978). As a result, institutions all but disappeared, but there is no proof that successors such as group homes are any better and there is some suggestion that they are just as bad or worse (Zigler, Hodapp, & Edison, 1990). Although not the same population, studies show that the deinstitutionalization of mentally ill individuals has had far-reaching, deleterious effects (Fuchs & Fuchs, 1995).

How did policies and practice in mental retardation drift so far from their foundations in knowledge (Paul & Rosselli-Kostoryz, 1997)? First, so called “best” practices have been determined by slogans and the loudest voices rather than by sound developmental principles; second, the current focus is on input, on where and what services are delivered, rather than on output, on how much progress individuals with disabilities actually make under the new system (MacMillan, Semmel, & Gerber, 1995). The science of mental retardation could be of great help in this area—at least it could have been before the discipline slipped toward “deprofessionalization,” and the “elucidation of cognitive, affective, and behavioral functioning of people with MR [was] largely discarded” (Jacobson & Mulick, 1996a, p. 3).

I entered the fray shortly before research became irrelevant. There actually was a good deal of research being conducted, much of it focused on the intellectual deficits of mental retardation. How I moved from there to studying the personality dynamics in retarded functioning is the story of this chapter. Before I map the path my research took, I will discuss the positions I have taken over the years on some topics that remain contentious.

IQ VERSUS SOCIAL ADAPTATION

Given the history of changing definitions in the area of mental retardation, definitions are a good place to start. While there is general agreement that the essential defining feature of mental retardation is lower intelligence than that displayed by the modal member of an appropriate reference group, there is disagreement over the meaning of intelligence that has only intensified in recent years.

One view is that intelligence refers to the quality of an individual’s behavior assessed against some criterion of social adaptation. The polar argument is that a clear distinction must be drawn between underlying intelligence and manifest behaviors that are typically labeled “intelligent.” Inherent in this position is the belief that behaviors indicative of social adaptation do not inevitably reflect normal intellectual functioning any more than the relative absence of such behaviors in the psychiatric patient or criminal inevitably reflects intellectual subnormality Researchers who espouse this view, including myself (Zigler, 1987), argue that the concept of social adaptation is much too vague and that the behaviors often placed within its rubric frequently stem from nonintellective influences. Supporting our position is the fact that measures of intelligence are very reliable and have high predictive validity, whereas adaptive behavior does not even have definitional and operational consensus and is far from having adequate standardized measurement (MacMillan, Gresham, & Siperstein, 1995; Simeonsson & Short, 1996).

However, in seeking a more satisfying definition of intelligence, this group, too, has reached no agreement. The fact is that definition making is an arbitrary exercise. This point is easily substantiated by looking at the similarities and differences in the definitions of mental retardation advanced by the American Association on Mental Retardation (1992), the American Psychiatric Association (1994), and Division 33 of the American Psychological Association (Jacobson & Mulick, 1996b), as well as reactions to them (e.g., Belmont & Borkowski, 1994; MacMillan, Gresham, & Siperstein, 1993). Obviously, even the professionals cannot agree on a “true” definition of the phenomenon. This proves to me that it is fruitless to argue whether a definition is true or false. The more appropriate point of contention is whether one definition is more useful than another with respect to organizing researchers’ thinking and giving direction to empirical and treatment efforts.

With these criteria in mind, I, along with others, have argued that intelligence is a hypothetical construct having as its ultimate referents the cognitive processes of the individual, for example, thought, memory, concept formation, and reasoning. Approached in this way, the problem of defining intelligence becomes one with the problem of determining the nature of cognition and its development. The attention to development here owes much to classic works by Werner, Piaget and Inhelder, and Vygotsky, who all sought to understand mental retardation within the context of normal intellectual development (Hodapp, Burack, & Zigler, 1998). A review of the history of psychometrics some time later led Tuddenham (1962) to suggest that an adequate theory of intelligence must provide an explanation of the curve of change in cognitive ability throughout the life span.

The delineation of cognition and its development as the essential focus of intelligence, and thus of mental retardation, has a certain appeal since it relates so readily to at least one noncontroversial phenomenon that forever differentiates the retarded individual from one of average intellect. Two adults of quite disparate IQs (for example, one of 70 and one of 100) may be employed in the same occupation, participate in the same community and recreational activities, and each be happily married and raising families. In terms of social adaptation indices, these two individuals appear similar. However, when attention is shifted to the development and present manifestation of their formal cognitive characteristics, it is not difficult to distinguish between them. They function quite differently on a wide variety of cognitive tasks and on a wide array of psychometric measures that also assess, albeit far from perfectly, basic cognitive processes. The individual of IQ 100 is clearly superior to the individual of IQ 70 in meeting the cognitive demands posed by these tasks. Thus it can be stated with certainty that, at the peak of their intellectual development, the cognitive functioning of the adult with average intelligence is at a higher level than that of the adult with mental retardation.

If cognitive differences are approached from a developmental point of view, we can observe that a retarded child progresses through the same stages of cognitive development as a peer who is not retarded, but at a slower rate. The performance of a child with mental retardation will thus resemble that of a younger, nonretarded child who is at the same developmental level more than that of a nonretarded agemate whose cognitive system has matured at a faster rate. How well each child has adapted to his or her environment really does not matter in this comparison, we are looking at the sum total of cognitive processes each child has available or has mastered that are being looked at. This cognitive collection of course mediates inputs from the environment and responses that the child makes in efforts to adapt. But the quality and nature of their information-processing systems will continue to differentiate the retarded and nonretarded children as they grow, while their relative success at adaptation may not. Therefore, although many thinkers disagree with me, I believe that it is only through reference to differences in the rate of development and final level of formal cognitive functioning that the distinction between intellectually retarded and nonretarded people can be reliably drawn.

COGNITIVE VERSUS MOTIVATIONAL DETERMINANTS OF BEHAVIOR

Now that I have presented a way to anchor an approach to mental retardation on a common ground—the nature and quality of cognitive processes—it must be noted that overemphasizing this basically sound position has resulted, at best, in incomplete and, at worst, totally erroneous explanations for the behavior of retarded persons. What happened is that workers generally concentrated on cognitive limitations and ignored other factors that could influence a retarded person’s actions. What was often forgotten is that the behavior of retarded people, like that of all human beings, reflects a lot more than formal cognitive processes.

When I began my career, there was a clear tendency in the scientific literature to attribute all of the atypical behavior of retarded groups to their cognitive deficiency Some of the more sophisticated theoretical efforts attempted to connect behaviors commonly observed in retarded individuals to specific hypothesized defects in the cognitive system. For example, ideas were put forth that retarded people suffer from a relative impermeability of the boundaries between regions in the cognitive structure, primary and secondary rigidity caused by subcortical and cortical malformations, inadequate neural satiation related to brain modifiability or cortical conductivity, impaired attention directing mechanisms, a relative brevity in the persistence of stimulus trace, or a dissociation between the verbal and motor systems.

I have long taken an adversarial stance toward the need to invoke such concepts when explaining differences in behavior between nonretarded and mildly retarded groups (e.g., Zigler, 1967). However, I have also defended these theoretical formulations as valuable in that they began to lead researchers away from a global approach toward a more fine-grained analysis of the cognitive processes of both retarded and nonretarded individuals. Thus, my contentions aside, the concepts on this list represent some of the most important programmatic theoretical efforts in the history of mental retardation research.

These concepts also comprise one side of the developmental versus difference controversy over the nature of mental retardation (Zigler, 1969; Zigler & Balla, 1982; Zigler & Hodapp, 1986). Difference theorists contend that all mental retardation stems from underlying organic dysfunctions that result in specific deficits in cognitive functioning and atypical cognitive development. Developmental theorists believe that this description applies only to individuals whose retardation is caused by organic impairments. Individuals with culturalfamilial retardation are seen as those in the lower portion of the normal distribution of intelligence. They therefore follow the same overall pattern of development as nonimpaired individuals, but they progress at a slower rate and ultimately attain a lower asymptote of cognitive functioning. These predictions are referred to as the similar structure and the similar sequence hypotheses, respectively. To date, the majority of the research favors the developmental model (Bennett-Gates & Zigler, 1998).

It is not my intention to pick the winner of this long-standing controversy. I list some of the difference positions only to show how much theoretical and empirical energy was devoted to understanding the cognitive shortcomings of retarded persons. As the list of hypothesized cognitive deficiencies grew over the years, it became common to explain any differences in behavior between nonretarded and retarded individuals with a selection of one defect or another that appeared relevant. While the “defectologists” thought they were on the right track, this fixation prevented researchers from dealing with the real complexities of the phenomena of mental retardation.

While no exception can be taken to circumscribed cognitive hypotheses concerning mental retardation, I must assert again that any cognitive theory of the behavior of retarded people is insufficient because few behaviors are purely cognitive in origin. While the analogy is far from perfect, consider that, as a group, children of lower socioeconomic status (SES) have lower IQs than middle-SES children. However, when differences in their behavior are found, IQ is but one of many factors considered in explaining them. Researchers look closely at the children’s social environments, educational histories, the childrearing practices used in their homes, and the attitudes, motives, goals, and experiences that they bring to the assessment situation. In contrast, when dealing with children with mental retardation,researchers seem to assume that their cognitive deficiency is such a pervasive determinant of their total functioning as to make them impervious to influences known to affect the behavior of everyone else.

This assumption is obvious in the research paradigm favored in the early decades of empirical work in mental retardation. Many studies employed comparisons of institutionalized, familial retarded children, many of whom were from the lowest SES, with middle-SES children who resided at home. These groups differed not only in respect to the quality of their cognitive functioning as defined by IQ, but also in respect to their total life histories and their current social-psychological interactions. Although individuals with mental retardation are generally no longer institutionalized, they are still subjected to relatively more social deprivation and rejection than are those of normal intellect. Modern scientists are ready—even anxious—to invoke these experiences in explaining the behavior of children from lower-income families. Yet, in the case of retarded individuals, researchers still rely so heavily on the cognitive deficiencies of retarded individuals that they tend to ignore environmental events that are known to be central in the genesis of personality in individuals of normal intellect.

In defense of researchers who employed this paradigm, it could be argued that one need not be very sensitive to motivational or personality differences between groups compared on tasks thought to be essentially cognitive in nature. In my opinion, such an argument is erroneous. Although it is true that the effects of particular motivational and emotional factors will vary as a function of the particular task employed, performance on no task can be considered the inexorable product of cognitive functioning, totally uninfluenced by other systems. Evidence in support of this point can be found in numerous studies that employed cognitive measures but found differences in performance to be associated with social class in IQ-matched individuals of normal intellect and related to institutional status in IQ-matched individuals of retarded intellect. Such findings lead me to reject the often implicitly held view that the cognitive deficiencies of the retarded individual are so ubiquitous in their effects that researchers may safely ignore personality variables which also distinguish our retarded subjects from their nonretarded comparison group. This strikes me as little more than a reaffirmation of a sound experimental dictum: A difference in performance on a dependent variable cannot safely be attributed to a known difference in subject characteristics (e.g., IQ) if the populations also differ on other factors which could reasonably affect, or have been demonstrated to affect, performance on the dependent measure.

The overly cognitive deterministic approach to the behavior of people with mental retardation stems from more than the implicit or explicit assumptions criticized here. It is also the result of the relative absence of sound empirical work dealing with personality factors in the behavior of retarded individuals. Had such a body of work developed over the years, it could have moderated the narrow cognitive orientation that for a time slowed progress in the understanding of mental retardation.

PERSONALITY MYTHS

Not only has relatively little work been done on the development and structure of personality in retarded individuals, but many of the views advanced have been inadequate and, in some instances, patently ridiculous. For example, in the early part of this century, a common opinion was that individuals of retarded intellect were essentially immoral, degenerate, and depraved. This point of view is apparent (and surprising, considering the source) in a statement made in 1912 by one of our nation’s pioneer figures in mental retardation, Walter Fernald:

The feebleminded are a parasitic, predatory class, never capable of self-...