The effect of subliminal visual perceptions on recognition of facial expressions of emotion among children with and without Learning Disabilities

The aim of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of subliminal primes on recognition of emotional facial expression and also comparing facial emotion recognition abilities in subjects with learning disabilities and without learning disabilities. Ninety subjects participated in the current study; including 45 student with learning disability(LD) ad 45 without LD. The subjects were compared for effectiveness of subliminal message in three groups: (a. control of group: recognition of emotional facial expressions without subliminal message b. first experimental group: recognition of emotional facial expressions with subliminal positive message c. second experimental groups: recognition of emotional facial expressions with subliminal negative message. also, compared recognition of emotional facial expression in normal children and (LD). In this study, a subliminal masked priming paradigm with varying faces as primes were used, and they were presented for duration of 30 ms and had two levels of emotion: positive emotion (happiness) and negative emotion (sadness). The results revealed a strong effect of emotional priming for positive emotion pictures. Participants both in normal group and LD tended to choose more target faces preceded by positive prime, when, subliminal prime was a positive emotion, but, the emotion priming for negative emotion pictures was only significant in LD group. Moreover, the current study demonstrated that normal group shows better recognition of sad facial expressions than the LD group, while the two groups do not differ in the recognition of other emotions. In other words, results show that both positive and negative emotional reactions can be unconsciously evoked.