Abstract
Aim: To investigate the ability of people with and without learning disabilities to express and recognise emotion in the human face, and to explore whether these two skills are related. A second aim was to investigate if being familiar with people with learning disabilities enhanced participants ability to recognise emotions expressed by this group. Method: Fifty nine participants, 17 members of staff working at day centers with people with learning disabilities, 16 controls who were unfamiliar with people with learning disabilities, and 26 adults with mild and moderate learning disabilities took part in an emotion expression and recognition task. The expression task required each participant to be filmed talking about happy and sad events. Edited clips from these interviews were then used to provide stimuli for the emotion recognition task. Results: Significant differences were reported between groups for the emotion recognition task, but no such difference was associated with emotion expression. The results did not find a relationship between skills in emotion expression and emotion recognition. No differences existed between the staff group and the controls for recognition of emotion in the faces of the adults with learning disabilities. Conclusion: The range of the scores for the adults with learning disabilities in the emotion recognition task casts doubts about whether deficits in recognising happy and sad emotion in the human face is necessarily associated with the presence of a learning disability. The failure to find group differences in emotion expression scores would suggest that adults with learning disabilities use facial expression to communicate emotion.