Perceived personality change after traumatic brain injury II: comparing participant and informant perspectives

ABSTRACT

Objective: The objective of this paper was to correlate informant personality change (PC) judgements following moderate–severe traumatic brain injury with quantitative neurobehavioural measures and to contrast the neurobehavioural correlates of informant and participant judgements of PC.

Participants: Informant–participant pairs were recruited from a medico-legal clinic passing effort tests (N = 31) and a National Health Service clinic (N = 40).

Measures: Participants were assessed on Wechsler tests of general ability, tests of executive functioning (Zoo Map and Fluency) and emotional distress (Beck Depression Inventory-FastScreen, Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale and State-Trait Anger Expression Inventory-II). Informants’ expressed emotion towards participants was assessed with the family questionnaire. Both completed the DEX, the Frontal and Social Behavior Questionnaire and PC ratings.

Results: The correlates of participant and informant ratings of participant PC partially overlapped. For example, participant self-reported PC was associated with self-reported dysexecutive symptoms and emotional distress. In contrast, informant report of participant PC was associated with lower perceived emotional recognition and empathy, informant report of dysexecutive symptoms and high informant expressed emotion.

Conclusions: It is argued that whilst researchers aim to exhaustively quantify specific neurobehavioural changes and their clusters, partially overlapping subsets of these changes evoke the PC judgements of participants and informants. The clinical implications of this are briefly considered.

KEYWORDS:

• Emotion recognition
• empathy
• frontal lobe
• executive functioning
• depression

Declaration of interest

The authors report no declarations of interest.