Emotional understanding in aggressive and nonaggressive individuals with mild or moderate mental retardation

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, individuals displaying emotional expressions in context, and cartoon characters in interaction. Control tasks dealt with the intellectual demands of each condition. Emotion identification improved with increasing contextual cues across both groups. Aggressive participants had greater difficulty labeling emotions in contextually rich photographs than their nonaggressive peers and were more likely to mislabel the target character's emotion as angry in the cartoon task. Findings have implications for models of aggression and clinical interventions.