Reading emotions after child brain injury: A comparison between children with brain injury and non-injured controls

Abstract

Primary objective: Child brain injury can have a lasting, detrimental effect upon socio-emotional behaviour, but little is known about underlying impairments that cause behavioural disturbance. This study explored the possibility that a proportion of difficulties result from compromise to systems in the brain which function in reading emotion in others from eyes, face expression or vocal tone.

Methods and procedures: Measures of ability in reading emotion from faces, voices and eyes were used in conjunction with a battery of tests of cognitive function, in gathering data from 18 children aged between 9–17 with acquired brain injuries (ABI). Performance levels were compared against the normative data from 67 matched ‘healthy’ children. Questionnaires were used as a measure of socio-emotional behaviour.

Main outcomes and results: The ABI children in the sample were worse than their same age peers at reading emotions. Regression analyses revealed that emotion recognition skills and cognitive abilities were generally unrelated. Some relationships between emotion reading difficulties and behaviour disturbance were found, however there were limitations associated with this particular finding.

Conclusions: Emotion-recognition skills, which are not routinely assessed following child brain injury, can be adversely affected as a consequence of brain injury in childhood.

• Paediatrics
• brain injuries
• emotions
• non-verbal communication