Emotional Make-Up of Visually Impaired and Hearing Impaired Adolescents

The adaptive experience, expression, and regulation of emotion are increasingly being recognized as core features of healthy intra-and interpersonal functioning across the lifespan. A critical aspect of child and adolescents development of social competence involves the ability to experience and express both positive and negative emotions. This to a large extent is hampered in the children with special abilities particularly visually impaired (VI) and hearmg impaired (HI) mainly because of their physical limitations. Despite being aware of all these facts studies have focused on EQ or emotional maturity but very few have tried to explore the role of Emotional Security in special children (visually impaired and hearing impaired) and its affect on their emotional make-up. Given the salience of the parent-child relationship to development, author proposed that security in the parent-adolescent relationship may be associated with functional emotional behavior leading to a healthier emotional development in special children. Family support is very important, more so in case of special children, who are already struggling with their disability since their birth, as they begin their life with an emotional set back of being different (not normal) from others which affects their further development. Therefore this study has attempted to investigate how emotional security with significant others affects the emotional make-up in terms of emotional proximity, awareness of emotion, expression of emotion and management of emotions in visually impaired and hearing impaired adolescents (N=40). The study employed qualitative methodology for both data collection as well as analysis. The findings of the study established that mothers followed by fathers were predominantly needed for the emotional proxtmity by both VI and HI adolescents. The results also showed that VI adolescents were happter when they achieved something whereas HI adolescents were happy when they received some gift. The results are discussed in light of earlier studies. Moreover the present paper will emphasize on the implications of present research for advancement and adjustment of VI and HI adolescents.