Background - Research suggests that having relevant contextual information can help increase the accuracy of emotion recognition in typically developing (TD) individuals and adults with an intellectual disability (ID). The impact of context on the emotion recognition of children with ID is unknown.

Method - Emotion recognition tasks, which varied in terms of contextual information, were completed by 102 children (45 with and 57 without ID).

Results - There was a significant effect of age and group, with older and TD children performing better on average. There were significant group by condition interactions, whereby children with ID were more accurate at identifying emotions depicted by line drawings compared with photos with contextual information that was not directly related to the emotion being depicted. The opposite was found for TD children.

Conclusions - These results have implications for socio-emotional interventions, such as universal school programmes.