ABSTRACT
This section on socioemotional factors addresses one of the most important, yet complex, issues relevant to learning disabilities. As the chapter by Goldstein and Dundon points out, diagnosticians and educators have struggled with the distinction between learning and emotional disorders. Recent definitions of learning disability have attempted to resolve the issue by making reference to emotional disturbance either as an exclusion criterion or as a secondary concomitant. The implicit assumption is that this criterion will serve to increase homogeneity within the diagnostic category by excluding those individuals who are manifesting learning problems as a consequence of emotional disorder. These individuals, presumably, are not suffering from a learning disability in the “pure” sense.
