Understanding Of Emotion-Descriptive And Abstract Concepts By Aggressive And Nonaggressive Adults With Mental Retardation

Abstract

Recent research indicates that individuals with mental retardation have deficits in processing facial expressions of emotion, but has not investigated other aspects of emotional processing such as understanding of affective concepts. This study investigated whether adults with mental retardation have difficulty understanding emotion-descriptive concepts, and if so, whether or not that difficulty can be attributed to a general difficulty with abstract concepts. Another aim was to determine if aggressive and nonaggressive adults differ in their understanding of emotion-descriptive concepts. Seventy-three participants were administered the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-Revised (Dunn & Dunn, 1981). Participants performed better on nonemotion than emotion concepts, but there was no performance difference between abstract and nonabstract concepts. Aggressive participants did not have more difficulty with emotion concepts than nonaggressive subjects. Findings support the "emotion specificity hypothesis" (Rojahn, Rabold, & Schneider, 1995b) and extend it to include difficulty with concepts which contain affective meaning. Implications for clinical assessment and intervention and suggestions for future research are discussed.

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