Abstract: Emotional display rule cognitive tasks and emotion decision figures were employed in the present experiment. 90 children selected from 1st, 3rd and 5th grade in a primary school (44 learning disabilities and 46 normal) were interviewed individually with 6 stories. The results indicated that expression regulation knowledge of learning disabilities and normal children increased as their grade increased, but the developmental level was different between two groups. There were no significant gender differences, and group and grade interaction was not found. Moreover, learning disabilities children report less social-orient goals than normal children, and there were no significant differences in self-protective goals. Comparing the combination of emotion display rule use and goals in the two samples, suggested that learning disabilities children lack the ability to integrate different emotion knowledge, in addition, normal children displayed more cognitive flexibility according to different interpersonal relationship than learning disabilities

Key words: learning disabilities, emotion, display rule, cognitive characteristics