Relation between Learning Disabilities and Socioemotional Skills in Children and Adolescents: A Systematic Review

The relationship of learning disabilities with social-emotional competencies has been a subject of extensive study in previous decades. It has been possible to identify that the decrease in socio-emotional competencies can hinder the development of the academic progress of students with learning disabilities. However, at present, the researches that address this issue have been comparatively scarce, and at certain points, it has been identified that they could be improved in future studies. Within the framework of this idea, this systematic and methodical review focuses on describing empirical studies that relate these two variables and, additionally, on analyzing and scrutinizing the results that most recent research have reached. This review has taken as reference databases such as Eric, Scopus, and PsycInfo, in the period from 2013 to 2018. The results show that, although most of the assessed studies acknowledge that children and adolescents with learning disabilities have lower socio-emotional competencies, it has not been possible to specify the causes of this relationship, besides, the various instruments used and the variety of theoretical explanations of the two variables studied, resulting in a lack of synchronicity in the explanation of these results. That is why it is necessary to deepen and expand the subject by manipulating other variables and fluctuations that could have an impact onthis relationship, like sex, the type of disabilities, age, and the cultural context in which the students operate, among others. The question of continuing with similar research to be carried out has been risen to modify the limitations discovered in terms of the instruments used, the variety of types of socio-emotional competences, the lack of specificity of learning disabilities, and especially in the systematic and longitudinal methodology which in turn provides the identification of more specific characteristics regarding the causal relationship of learning disabilities and socio-emotional competences.