Abstract
This study investigated the perception of emotions and the social skills of 60 eighth-grade adolescents with learning disabilities (LD) and adolescents without LD. The adolescents (n = 30 with LD; n = 30 without LD; mean age = 13.95 years) were asked to identify 6 different emotions expressed by an actor making the same verbally neutral statement: happiness, anger, surprise, sadness, disgust, and fear. The emotions were each presented in 3 modes: auditory, visual, and combined auditory-visual. Participants' social skills were evaluated by self-assessment questionnaires and teacher ratings. The results showed that the participants with LD performed significantly lower than their peers without LD in the perception of emotions via all 3 modes. In both groups, solely visual perception of emotions surpassed solely auditory, and the combined auditory-visual mode surpassed either of the 2 separate modes. Yet, the auditory-visual minus visual differential demonstrated that the adolescents without LD were able to make better use of the combined mode compared to the adolescents with LD. Teachers evaluated the social skills of the group with LD as lower than the skills of the group without LD. Finally, for the adolescents with LD, the results of regression analysis suggested that perception of emotions through nonverbal cues was only a partially mediating factor for 2 aspects of their social functioning-assertion and introversion-indicating the influence of other variables in their poorer social skills.