Facial emotions recognition represent an important ability in everyday life. Individuals with mental retardation have problems in recognizing facial expressions of emotion. But little has been studied about the timing of this processing. This study tested the hypothesis that recognition of emotions would be slower in individual with MR. There were three groups of participants according to their Cronological Age (children and adults) and their intelligence level (normal or retarded). The experimental stimuli were 96 photographs of adults. We presented photos on a PC varying the affective content and the duration of presentation (1 and 3sec.). Subjects were asked to identify the happy, sad or angry expressions. It was found that expression recognition in MR was worse than that of chronologically age-matched controls but indistinguishable from that of mental age controls. There was no significant difference for duration of presentation.
