Emotion recognition of faces and emoji in individuals with moderate-severe traumatic brain injury

ABSTRACT

Background

Facial emotion recognition deficits are common after moderate-severe traumatic brain injury (TBI) and linked to poor social outcomes. We examine whether emotion recognition deficits extend to facial expressions depicted by emoji.

Methods

Fifty-one individuals with moderate-severe TBI (25 female) and fifty-one neurotypical peers (26 female) viewed photos of human faces and emoji. Participants selected the best-fitting label from a set of basic emotions (anger, disgust, fear, sadness, neutral, surprise, happy) or social emotions (embarrassed, remorseful, anxious, neutral, flirting, confident, proud).

Results

We analyzed the likelihood of correctly labeling an emotion by group (neurotypical, TBI), stimulus condition (basic faces, basic emoji, social emoji), sex (female, male), and their interactions. Participants with TBI did not significantly differ from neurotypical peers in overall emotion labeling accuracy. Both groups had poorer labeling accuracy for emoji compared to faces. Participants with TBI (but not neurotypical peers) had poorer accuracy for labeling social emotions depicted by emoji compared to basic emotions depicted by emoji. There were no effects of participant sex.

Discussion

Because emotion representation is more ambiguous in emoji than human faces, studying emoji use and perception in TBI is an important consideration for understanding functional communication and social participation after brain injury.

KEYWORDS:

• Traumatic brain injury
• emotion recognition
• facial affect recognition
• emoji
• faces

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by NIDCD grants R01 HD071089 a to M.C.D., L.T., & B.M.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/02699052.2023.2181401

Notes

1. This preregistration also includes procedures for data collection for a survey task in which participants with TBI generated free-text labels and provided valence and arousal ratings for frequently used emoji, as well as answered questions about their motives and attitudes toward emoji use. This survey was always completed before the current study so that the emotion labels used in the current study did not influence their freely generated perceptions of emoji emotions. The survey shares a common aim of understanding perception of emotions depicted by emoji in TBI, but its results are reported separately.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders [R01 NIH HD071089].