Sizing up a situation: LD children’s understanding of sodal interactions. Learning Disability Quarterly

Abstract. Learning disabled (LD) and nondisabled (NLD) children were shown a series of soap opera vignettes in order to test their comprehension of interpersonal interactions. Results showed that the LD group consistently made more social comprehension errors than did the NLD group. The contribution of LD children's social comprehension problems to their lack of social acceptance is discussed. While it is well established that learning dis-abled (LD) children have difficulty achieving social acceptance (e.g., Bruininks, 1978; Bryan, 1974) the reasons for their problems in this area remain unclear. One hypothesis is that LD children appear to be insensitive because they fail to correctly interpret social and emotional cues which reflect the feelings, thoughts, and in-tentions of others. Support for this hypothesis comes from several sources. Studies on role-taking, for example, have found that LD children are less likely to understand how other children feel in different situations than are non-disabled (NLD) children (Bachara, 1976), and are less accurate than nondisabled peers in their understanding of others ' thoughts and feelings when these conflict with their own (Dickstein & Warren, 1980; Horowitz, 1981; Wong & Wong, 1980). In an interview study in which children were asked to interpret pictures depicting dif-ferent social situations, the LD children made fewer correct inferences and more errors than did their NLD classmates (Bruno, 1981). Still other studies have shown that LD children make more mistakes in identifying the emotions con-veyed by others than do NLD children (Bryan, 1977; Wiig & Harris, 1974). While the results of these studies are sug-gestive, they do not examine the accuracy of LD children's understanding of complex, realistic social interactions. In the present study, LD and NLD children were shown short segments from soap operas in which subtle emotional and social relationships between the characters were depicted. After each segment, the subjects were questioned to determine their comprehension of the scenarios. It was hypothesized that LD children would be more likely to "misread " the situations than would the NLD children