Emotion specificity in mental retardation.

The emotion-specificity hypothesis states that mental retardation is associated with deficits in decoding facially expressed emotions that cannot be fully accounted for by MA. Research has demonstrated repeatedly that subjects with mental retardation do not perform as well on emotion recognition tasks as do control subjects but not whether those performance deficits are specific to affective cues. The emotion-specificity hypothesis was tested further with three groups of 16 subjects: adults with mild to moderate mental retardation, similar age adults without mental retardation, and children without mental retardation matched for mental age (MA). Subjects completed the Facial Discrimination Task, which has two subtasks consisting of 40 monochrome facial photographs, and rated stimuli on scales ranging from happy to sad or from young to old. Results supported the emotion-specificity hypothesis: The retarded group was significantly less accurate on the emotion task than were both control groups. On the age task the retarded adult group and nonretarded child group were less accurate than the adult control group.