Measuring emotion perception following traumatic brain injury: The Complex Audio Visual Emotion Assessment Task (CAVEAT)

Introduction: While emotion recognition difficulties in moderate-severe TBI are well established, the standard measures of emotion recognition significantly limit the conclusions which can be drawn regarding real-life deficits. Two studies report on the development of CAVEAT, a new measure of emotion recognition that attempts to overcome these limitations.

Method: These studies were designed to establish CAVEAT's psychometric properties by examining performance of a TBI group and matched controls in order to provide estimates of its reliability and validity (study 1), and to compare performance of the TBI and control groups on a subgroup of emotions from the CAVEAT that represented the six basic emotions used in conventional emotion research (study 2). Thirty-two participants with TBI and 32 matched controls (study 1) and 16 participants with TBI and 12 matched controls (study 2) participated in this study.

Results: CAVEAT demonstrated high construct validity and internal consistency. Performance on the subgroup of “basic” six emotions was largely similar to the rates reported in the literature.

Conclusions: These findings provided some evidence for the psychometric properties of CAVEAT, indicating that it can be used as a clinical test for assessing emotion recognition in people with moderate-severe TBI.