Recognition of emotion from facial expression following traumatic brain injury

Primary Objective: To assess three domains of emotion recognition in people with traumatic brain injury (TBI).

Research design: A between group comparison.

Procedures: Twenty-four participants with severe TBI and 15 matched participants without brain damage were asked to label and match facial expressions with and without context. The participants with TBI were also interviewed regarding changes in subjective experience of emotion.

Main outcomes and results: Participants with TBI were found to be significantly impaired on expression labelling and matching, but experienced some improvement when provided with context. Negative emotions were particularly affected. Affective semantic knowledge and face perception appeared to be relatively intact in this group. The majority of participants with TBI reported some change in the post-injury experience of everyday emotion, although the pattern of changes differed greatly between individuals. Reduced subjective experience, especially of sadness and fear, was associated with poor emotion matching but not emotion labelling.