Identification of vocally expressed emotions by mentally retarded and nonretarded individuals

Nonretarded, TMR, and EMR individuals matched on MA attempted to identify the emotional states (happy, angry, sad, or fearful) of tape-recorded voices speaking in an unfamiliar language by pointing to one of four stick-figure depictions of the emotions. Although analyses indicated that TMR subjects were less accurate overall than were EMR and nonretarded subjects, all three groups were able to identify each of the emotions well above chance expectation. Of the four emotions, fear was judged least accurately by each group. Correlational analyses revealed that accuracy in decoding emotional passages was positively related to IQ and CA. Generally, the experimental and correlational findings indicated few important differences in patterns of emotion identification among the groups and were consistent with results obtained in other studies of nonverbal decoding by nonretarded individuals.