How does visual context influence recognition of facial emotion in people with traumatic brain injury?

ABSTRACT

Objective: The current study assessed recognition of facial emotional stimuli following traumatic brain injury (TBI) and examined whether performance may be influenced by emotional visual scenes.

Methods: Thirty-five patients with moderate-to-severe TBI and 55 matched controls completed the novel Angers Facial Expression in Context Task (AFECT), designed to examine recognition of facial expressions of basic emotions in both congruent and incongruent emotional visual contexts.

Results: In comparison with non-brain damaged adults, patients with TBI performed more poorly and slowly on both contextual conditions (congruent vs. incongruent) of the AFECT.

Conclusion: Taken together, these results raise the possibility that adults with TBI may not fully benefit from supportive contextual cues. Also, they stress the importance of using emotional stimuli that better capture affect processing in real-world contexts and open up new avenues to better understand negative social outcomes in patients with TBI.

KEYWORDS:

• Traumatic brain injury
• emotion recognition
• facial expression
• visual context

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank R. Levasseur, A. Longaud-Vales and F. Pineau for their help in stimuli production and C. Houeix, C. Martin, A. Massin and C. Troupel for their help in data acquisition.

Declaration of interest

Céline Lancelot and Cindy Gilles declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Authors’ contribution

CL designed the experiment. CL and CG performed data acquisition and analyses. CL and CG interpreted the results. CL wrote the paper. All authors have contributed to, seen and approved the manuscript.