Visual and auditory affect recognition in singly diagnosed mentally retarded patients, mentally retarded patients with autism and normal young children.

Five groups were tested for facial and postural affect recognition by use of word and tonal prompts. Group 1 contained normal young children. Groups 2 and 3 were moderately retarded and Groups 4 and 5 were severely retarded. Retardation was complicated by autism in Groups 3 and 5. There were eight conditions. In Condition 1, happy, sad and angry faces were displayed simultaneously in each of 18 trials, with the subjects prompted verbally to point to one of the affects (e.g., the angry face) in a given trial. In Condition 2, full figures (with facial features omitted) were used instead of the faces, and emotion was conveyed by use of body position and muscle tone. The same procedure was followed as before. Conditions 3 and 4 were repeated of 1 and 2, except that descriptive word prompts were used (e.g., point to the yelling picture). Conditions 5 and 6 were the same as 1 and 2, except that affective voice intonations were used instead of word prompts. The subjects had to identify the voice tones by using affective words (e.g., happy) in Condition 7, and descriptive words (e.g., laughing) in Condition 8. An analysis of the error data indicated that retarded subjects had particular difficulty recognizing angry stimuli with both affective and descriptive word prompting. In addition, they tended to confuse happy with angry voice tones.