You & I. Mentalizing and stress regulation of people with mild to borderline intellectual disabilities: Skill assessment and effects of serious games

Social and cognitive skills are vital for forming and maintaining relationships. People with mild to borderline intellectual disabilities have the opportunity to enrich their social relationships by actively refining their abilities in mentalizing and stress regulation. Addressing these challenges involves accurately assessing these abilities and developing tailored interventions, with serious games showing promise. However, reliable assessment tools for these skills, effective serious games tailored to this population, and a design model that takes into account user needs are lacking. This dissertation contributes to the understanding, measuring, and promoting of social-cognitive skills, and specifically mentalizing and stress regulation, in people with mild to borderline intellectual disabilities. It provides the first questionnaire, the adapted Reflective Functioning Questionnaire for adults with mild to borderline intellectual disabilities, and a new model for co-creative serious game development. In a randomized controlled trial, the effectiveness of the serious game ‘You & I’ was examined. The game shows to be a positively rated game, with a positive effect found on stress level, but no effects on mentalizing. Furthermore, there is evidence supporting the effectiveness of serious games for children with intellectual disabilities. The findings emphasize the potential of serious games but underscore the need for interventions which can effectively contribute to the improvement of the mentalizing in this population. In conclusion, the results of the current dissertation have relevant implications for both research and practice with the aim to contribute to the mentalizing and stress regulation of people with mild to borderline intellectual disabilities, enhancing successful social interactions and relationships.