This study of 501 children and adults found that subjects with mental retardation or borderline intelligence were less proficient at identifying facial expressions of emotion than were children of average intelligence. Among individuals with mental retardation or borderline intelligence, recognition increased with intelligence quotient. Among…

The ability of children with Down syndrome to recognize expressions of emotion was compared to performance in typically developing and nonspecific intellectual disability groups matched on either MA or a performance-related measure. Our goal was to (a) resolve whether specific emotions present recognition difficulties; (b) investigate patterns of…

People with Williams syndrome are extremely sociable, empathic, and expressive in communication. Some researchers suggest they may be especially sensitive to perceiving emotional expressions. We administered the Faces and Paralanguage subtests of the Diagnostic Analysis of Nonverbal Accuracy Scale (DANVA2), a standardized measure of emotion…

Face processing and facial expression recognition was investigated in 17 adults with Down syndrome, and results were compared with those of a child control group matched for receptive vocabulary. On the tasks involving faces without emotional content, the adults with Down syndrome performed significantly worse than did the controls. However, their…

Deficits in emotion recognition have been linked with aggression. However, the ecological validity of previous studies is limited. In this study we developed new materials to investigate the emotion identification skills of 19 frequently aggressive and 15 nonaggressive adults with mental retardation. The three tasks included photographs of faces,…