Emotional recognition from dynamic facial, vocal and musical expressions following traumatic brain injury

Abstract

Objectives: To assess emotion recognition from dynamic facial, vocal and musical expressions in sub-groups of adults with traumatic brain injuries (TBI) of different severities and identify possible common underlying mechanisms across domains.Methods: Forty-one adults participated in this study: 10 with moderate–severe TBI, nine with complicated mild TBI, 11 with uncomplicated mild TBI and 11 healthy controls, who were administered experimental (emotional recognition, valence-arousal) and control tasks (emotional and structural discrimination) for each domain.Results: Recognition of fearful faces was significantly impaired in moderate–severe and in complicated mild TBI sub-groups, as compared to those with uncomplicated mild TBI and controls. Effect sizes were medium–large. Participants with lower GCS scores performed more poorly when recognizing fearful dynamic facial expressions. Emotion recognition from auditory domains was preserved following TBI, irrespective of severity. All groups performed equally on control tasks, indicating no perceptual disorders. Although emotional recognition from vocal and musical expressions was preserved, no correlation was found across auditory domains.Conclusions: This preliminary study may contribute to improving comprehension of emotional recognition following TBI. Future studies of larger samples could usefully include measures of functional impacts of recognition deficits for fearful facial expressions. These could help refine interventions for emotional recognition following a brain injury.

Keywords:

• Traumatic brain injury
• mild
• complicated mild
• moderate
• severe
• emotions
• faces
• non-linguistic vocalizations
• music

Acknowledgements

We are also grateful to the Centre de réadaptation Lucie-Bruneau and to the Centre de réadaptation Constance-Lethbridge for their help with recruitment of TBI participants. We thank Olivier Piché, Bernard Bouchard and Nathanaël Lécaudé for technical assistance, as well as the participants who took part in our study.

Declaration of interest

This study was supported by the National Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada and the Centre de réadaptation Lucie-Bruneau (grants to M.M.), a Canada Research Chair (to I.P.), the Fonds de recherche du Québec-Santé and the Faculté des études supérieures et postdoctorales de l’Université de Montréal (scholarships to J.D.). The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper.