Judgments of EMR students toward their peers: effects of label and academic competence

To test the relative potency of a clinical label and behavioral competence on the judgments of EMR students, we asked special-class students to evaluate a target child (labeled "mentally retarded" or "regular" student) who performed competently or incompetently on an academic task, controlling sex of target. The EMR students rated the target child in a manner similar to that of nonretarded raters. They responded most negatively to the incompetent retarded target child, while expressing positive affect toward the other three target children, in ascending order: the incompetent nonlabeled, competent retarded, and competent nonlabeled child. For these subjects competence was valued highly and more potently determined their expressed attitude than did the assigned label.