Recognition and Understanding of Emotions in Persons with Mild to Moderate Mental Retardation

Abstract

Deficits in intellectual ability have been linked to deficits in emotion understanding and consequently social competence. Research suggests that individuals with mental retardation exhibit deficits in their ability to identify emotional states in themselves and others, relative to normal mental age matched controls and peers and display an inability to decode facial expressions of emotion. Emotional experience is elicited in part by a cognitive appraisal of a situation toward a goal. However, the ecological validity of previous studies is limited. In this study we developed new materials to investigate the emotion understanding skills of persons with mild to moderate mental retardation. Six tasks included faces displaying emotion in context, comic strips, audio, video and audio-visual material of individuals expressing emotions in context. Results indicated that the mentally retarded were able to identify emotions in context than expressions without context and emotion understanding improved with increasing contextual cues and dynamic content.