A cross-sectional study was conducted in which level of mood recognition was assessed from early childhood through old age. Asymptotic performance was obtained on facial affect recognitions tasks from ages 3-34 yrs. There was a progressive decline in facial affect recognitions beginning at age 45, with the principal problem that of recognizing angry faces. With respect to auditory prosody, there was an improvement in recognition level from ages 3-12 yrs. Performance remained asymptotic through age 43 and then began to decline increasingly beyond age 45.

Facial affect recognition was studied in groups of mildly retarded subjects, moderately retarded subjects, and nonretarded children. Subjects were tested under five conditions. In Condition 1, they were presented with happy, sad and angry faces simultaneously in each of 18 trials and were prompted with short commands to point to one of the affective faces. Conditions 2 and 3 were the same as the first, except that subjects were prompted with short affective vignettes. In Condition 2, the vignettes were followed by tag lines identifying the moods of the vignettes. There were no tag lines in Condition 3. Conditions 4 and 5 were identical to Conditions 2 and 3, except that the vignettes were longer. The error data were analyzed and results showed that the groups did not differ in response to short commands and vignette prompts produced more errors than short commands. Also, long vignettes gave rise to more mistakes than short vignettes, and vignettes without tag lines resulted in more errors than those with tag lines. Group differences emerged when vignettes were presented, with more errors made as level of retardation and length of vignettes increased. It was concluded that mental retardation is not associated with a disturbance in facial affect recognition.