The study examined emotional-motivational personality characteristics of 15 learning disabled, 15 normal achieving, and 15 high achieving students (grades 3-5). The study tested the hypothesis derived from the A-R-D (attitude-reinforcer-discriminative) theory of motivation that learning disabled (LD) children differ from normal and high achieving children in an emotional motivational personality characteristic that would, in terms of the theory's basic principles, help to explain their relatively poor school learning and performance. The personality characteristic--attitude toward school stimuli--was measured using a questionnaire composed of 12 school- and 12 play-related words. As predicted, repeated measures analysis of variance results and the results of a Newman-Keuls followup test indicated that the LD Ss expressed a significantly different, i.e., less positive, attitude toward the school words than either the normal or high achieving children, while no differences were found among the groups in attitude expressed towards words that were play-related. (Author/CL)