Recognition of emotion by mentally retarded adolescents and young adults.

Mentally retarded adolescents and young adults, together with nonretarded children individually matched for verbal mental age, were given tasks in which they chose photographs of faces to accompany emotionally expressive voices and photographs of nonemotional things or events to accompany recorded sounds. Retarded individuals performed less well than did nonretarded control subjects on the emotion tasks but were not so impaired on the nonemotion tasks. These results suggest that mentally retarded individuals may have specific deficits in recognizing how bodily expressions of emotion are coordinated with each other.