Recognition of facial expressions of emotion by Chinese adults with mental retardation.
Chinese adults with ID trail children in naming facial emotions, and the gap holds across cultures.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Leung et al. (1998) asked Chinese adults with intellectual disability to name photos of faces showing six emotions. The team compared their answers to scores from children without disabilities.
The study used a simple paper test. No teaching was given. Adults just pointed or said the emotion word they saw.
What they found
The adults with ID scored lower than the children on most items. Surprise, fear, anger, and disgust were the hardest.
Age and IQ did not explain the poor scores. Even older or higher-IQ adults still missed many faces.
How this fits with other research
Repp et al. (1992) saw the same deficit six years earlier in Western adults. The new data show the problem is not tied to one culture.
Nijs et al. (2016) later tested adults in the community and found even larger gaps, so the 1998 lab result was not a fluke.
Hetzroni et al. (2002) looks like it disagrees, because their sample with mild ID did better. The gap vanishes when you see they only counted mild cases, while Leung et al. (1998) mixed severity levels.
Why it matters
If your adult client with ID struggles in social groups, poor face reading may be the block. Screen it quickly with photo cards. Add emotion lessons to your social skills plan, and start with happy faces before moving to fear and anger.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
We compared the ability of Chinese adults with mental retardation and nonhandicapped Chinese children to recognize the six basic facial expressions of emotion. Each subject was told a story identifying an emotion, presented with an array of six photographs of basic facial expressions of emotion, and asked to point to the photograph that depicted the story's emotion. Results showed that the children were more accurate than the adults in recognizing facial expressions of emotion except happiness on which both groups achieved 100% accuracy. Surprise, fear, anger, and disgust were confused most often by both groups. Recognition proficiency was not significantly correlated with age in the children or with IQ in the adults. Our results partially replicated those reported in earlier studies with non-Chinese individuals with mental retardation and raised the possibility that there may be cultural influences on a person's ability to recognize facial expressions of emotion.
Behavior modification, 1998 · doi:10.1177/01454455980222008