Facial emotion recognition of older adults with traumatic brain injury

ABSTRACT

Objectives: The objective of this study was to examine the effects of traumatic brain injury (TBI) and age on facial emotion recognition abilities in adults. Age and TBI were expected to have negative effects on emotion recognition and a TBI by age interaction was hypothesized such that older adults with TBI would have the lowest emotion recognition scores. Methods: A prospective cohort study was conducted. Participants were 26 adults with moderate-severe TBI (13 older and 13 younger) and 26 uninjured peers matched for age, sex, and education. Emotion recognition was measured using the Emotion Recognition Task, which is comprised of dynamically morphed facial expressions of the six basic emotions, presented at different intensity levels. Results : TBI and older age were associated with poorer recognition of both subtle and intense expressions, but only for expressions of anger and sadness. There was no interaction of age and TBI. Conclusions: Results add to the growing evidence of emotion recognition impairments after TBI, particularly for select negative emotions, and extend this finding to adults over the age of 60. Further research is needed to better understand social cognitive effects of TBI across the adult lifespan.

KEYWORDS:

• Traumatic brain injury
• social cognition
• affect recognition
• aging
• speech–language pathology

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Dr Erica Richmond and the student researchers on the Social Building Blocks Project for their assistance with data collection and scoring.

Declaration of interest

This manuscript was prepared in part at the William S. Middleton Memorial Veterans Hospital in Madison, WI; GRECC manuscript No. 003-2019. The views and content expressed in this article are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the position, policy, or official views of the Department of Veteran Affairs or the US government. This work was supported by NICHD/NCMRR grant [R01 HD071089]. The authors have no conflicts of interest to report.

Supplementary material

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