Enhancing the recognition and production of facial expressions of emotion by children with mental retardation.

English et al. (1995) worked with children with intellectual disability. They wanted to see if directed rehearsal could teach the kids to both read and show the six basic facial emotions.

The team first trained recognition. They showed a face, said the emotion, and had the child point. They repeated until the child hit mastery. Next they trained production. They gave an emotion name and prompted the child to pose the face. They repeated and gave praise.

The study used a single-case design. They tracked each child's accuracy across sessions. They also checked if the skills lasted up to 12 weeks and if parents saw real-world change.

Recognition improved fast. Most kids hit mastery after one or two short sessions. Production took longer. After extra training blocks, every child could pose happy, sad, angry, scared, surprised, and disgusted faces on cue.

The gains stuck. Twelve weeks later, the kids still scored high. Parents said their children now read faces better at home and showed more varied facial expressions during play.

Repp et al. (1992) did a similar study with adults. They used a larger DTT package and also saw big, lasting gains. The 1995 study extends that work downward in age and shows production can be added.

Four later studies with autistic children look like contradictions. Evers et al. (2015), Schlundt et al. (1999), and Song et al. (2018) all report that autistic kids struggle to read facial emotions even without training. Fink et al. (2014) finds no deficit once verbal skill is controlled. The key difference is diagnosis. The kids in A et al. had intellectual disability, not autism. Their positive results do not clash with the autism findings because the populations differ.

Root et al. (2017) and Carvajal et al. (2012) looked only at children with Down syndrome. They measured emotion recognition without training and found mixed results. English et al. (1995) shows that when you add directed rehearsal, children with ID can improve quickly.

If you serve kids with ID, directed rehearsal is a cheap, fast tool. Spend five minutes per session on recognition first. When that is solid, add production drills. Use clear prompts, quick repeats, and praise. Track each skill separately because production takes longer. The payoff is a child who both reads and shows emotions, making peer play and family life smoother.