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Abstract
The present study aimed to comprehensively examine social cognition processes in children with and without learning disabilities (LD), focusing on social information processing (SIP) and complex emotional understanding capabilities such as understanding complex, mixed, and hidden emotions. Participants were 50 children with LD (age range 9.4-12.7; 35 boys, 15 girls) and 50 children without LD matched on grade, age, and gender. Children analyzed 4 social vignettes using Dodge's SIP model and completed 2 emotional recognition tasks (pictures and stories) and 4 emotional knowledge tasks, such as providing definitions and examples for 5 emotions (e.g., loneliness, pride, embarrassment). Study results demonstrated that children with LD had major difficulties in SIP processes and consistent difficulties with the different tasks in the understanding of complex emotions and in higher emotional understanding capabilities, such as understanding that 2 conflicting emotions (love and hate) can be simultaneously experienced. We discuss the implications of such difficulties for the understanding of social competence in children with LD as well as their implications for social skills intervention.
Although researchers continue to debate the status of social-emotional difficulties relative to cognitive-academic difficulties among children with learning disabilities (LD), a strong consensus exists regarding the centrality of social-emotional abilities to the characterization of the disorder (American Psychiatric Association, 1994). Kavale and Forness's (1996) meta-analysis provided support for this consensus by demonstrating social skills deficits in 75% of the children with LD.
Among the different domains included in children's social competence (e.g., social cognition, peer interaction, play), social cognition is the domain that most closely links cognitive and social-emotional capabilities. Social cognition includes the child's ability to spontaneously read and correctly interpret verbal and nonverbal social and emotional cues; the ability to recognize central and peripheral social and emotional information; the knowledge of different social behaviors and their consequences in diverse social tasks (e.g., how to initiate a conversation, how to negotiate needs, how to make group entry); and the ability to make an adequate attribution about another person's mental state (i.e., "theory of mind" abilities or role-taking abilities; Crick & Dodge, 1994). As such, social cognition can be considered one of the most difficult areas for children with LD, linking their cognitive (e.g., attention, memory, reasoning, focusing, processing information; American Psychiatric Association, 1994)...