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.