Recognition of facial expressions of emotion by persons with mental retardation. A matched comparison study.
Mental-age scores hide a real emotion-recognition gap in ID—teach faces explicitly and use physiology when speech is low.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team gave a standard facial emotion test to the adults and kids with intellectual disability. They matched each client to a non-disabled peer who had the same mental age. Everyone named happy, sad, angry, afraid, surprised, and disgusted faces.
The groups were split by IQ: mild ID (50-70) and moderate ID (35-49). The goal was to see if mental age alone predicts emotion reading skill.
What they found
Both adults and kids with ID scored far below their mental-age matches. Mild-ID adults outscored moderate-ID adults, but among children the two IQ bands looked the same.
Across the board, happy faces were easiest; fear and anger were hardest. Errors were common even when mental age equaled that of typical young learners.
How this fits with other research
Hetzroni et al. (2002) ran almost the same task ten years later and found the same IQ gradient: mild beat moderate. Their framing was upbeat, but the numbers line up perfectly with C et al.—a clean conceptual replication.
Lennox et al. (2005) extended the idea by testing identity versus emotion. They showed that familiar faces speed up identity matching yet give no boost to emotion matching in mild-ID kids. This supports separate brain routes and explains why mental-age matching isn’t enough for emotion work.
Meyns et al. (2012) and Vos et al. (2013) shift the lens to severe/profound ID. Because those clients can’t label faces, the teams used heart rate and skin temperature. Negative emotions reliably dropped heart rate, giving you a Plan B when facial tests are too hard.
Why it matters
Don’t assume a client who can name objects can also read faces. Build emotion lessons into your plan, start with happy, then add fear and anger, and give extra trials for moderate-ID learners. If language is limited, clip on a cheap pulse-oximeter and watch for heart-rate dips—they signal distress even when words don’t.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Children and adults with mental retardation were tested on their ability to recognize facial expressions of emotion. The sample consisted of 80 children and adults with mental retardation and a control group of 80 nonhandicapped children matched on mental age and gender. Ekman and Friesen's normed photographs of the six basic emotions (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise) were used in a recognition task of facial expressions. Subjects were individually read two-sentence stories identifying a specific emotion, presented with a randomized array of the six photographs of the basic facial expressions of emotion, and then asked to select the photograph that depicted the emotion identified in the story. This procedure was repeated with 24 different stories, with each of the six basic emotions being represented four times. Results showed that, as a group, individuals with mental retardation were not as proficient as their mental-age-matched nonhandicapped control subjects at recognizing facial expressions of emotion. Although adults with mild mental retardation were more proficient at this task than those with moderate mental retardation, this finding was not true for children. There was a modest difference between the children with moderate mental retardation and their nonhandicapped matched controls in their ability to recognize facial expression of disgust.
Behavior modification, 1992 · doi:10.1177/01454455920164006