Assessing the understanding of emotional states in a population of adolescents and young adults with mental handicaps.

This study investigated emotional awareness, the recognition and understanding of different emotional states, among a non-clinical population of adolescents and young adults with mental handicaps. While emotional awareness showed a high positive correlation with language comprehension, the results suggest that many of these individuals have specific emotional awareness deficits which are not in line with their language comprehension abilities. This finding suggests that the assessment of emotional awareness would be an important step in the choice of a self-report measure to assess an individual's emotional state.