Emotion recognition depends on subjective emotional experience and not on facial expressivity: evidence from traumatic brain injury

ABSTRACT

Background: Recognizing how others feel is paramount to social situations and commonly disrupted following traumatic brain injury (TBI). This study tested whether problems identifying emotion in others following TBI is related to problems expressing or feeling emotion in oneself, as theoretical models place emotion perception in the context of accurate encoding and/or shared emotional experiences.

Methods: Individuals with TBI (n = 27; 20 males) and controls (n = 28; 16 males) were tested on an emotion recognition task, and asked to adopt facial expressions and relay emotional memories according to the presentation of stimuli (word and photos). After each trial, participants were asked to self-report their feelings of happiness, anger and sadness. Judges that were blind to the presentation of stimuli assessed emotional facial expressivity.

Results: Emotional experience was a unique predictor of affect recognition across all emotions while facial expressivity did not contribute to any of the regression models. Furthermore, difficulties in recognizing emotion for individuals with TBI were no longer evident after cognitive ability and experience of emotion were entered into the analyses.

Conclusions: Emotion perceptual difficulties following TBI may stem from an inability to experience affective states and may tie in with alexythymia in clinical conditions.

KEYWORDS:

• Emotion recognition
• facial expressivity
• traumatic brain injury
• emotional experience
• feeling
• alexithymia

Disclosure Statement

The authors report no conflicts of interest

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Project Grant [DP0988689].