Facial Expression During Emotional Monologues in Unilateral Stroke: An Analysis of Monologue Segments

Abstract

Emotional monologues of brain-damaged subjects were examined to determine whether interhemispheric or intrahemispheric differences exist for facial emotional expression. A special feature was the comparison of expressions produced during the initial, middle, and last segments of the monologues. Videotaped emotional and non-emotional monologues from the New York Emotion Battery (Borod, Welkowitz, & Obler, 1992) of eight right brain-damaged (RBD), eight left brain-damaged (LBD), and eight normal control (NC) subjects, with matching for demographics and lesion location, were rated. Five raters were trained to evaluate the emotional intensity and category accuracy of the facial expressions produced during these monologues. Results revealed some support for a reversed valence effect, with RBDs showing relatively less accurate performance during positive monologues. Intrahemispheric results revealed that, overall, RBDs with frontal lobe lesions showed the least intense facial expressions. Segment analysis found that individuals produced facial expressions with significantly more emotional intensity during the middle and last thirds of the monologues than during the initial third of the monologues. Findings indicate intrahemispheric as well as interhemispheric differences in facial emotional expression and suggest the utilization of the latter parts of monologues in the evaluation of emotional expression, which has potential clinical implications.

Key words:

• brain damage
• emotion
• facial expression
• laterality
• narrative
• stroke

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This study was based on a master's thesis conducted by Seta Kazandjian at Queens College and The Graduate Center of The City University of New York (CUNY). Findings from this article were presented at the International Neuropsychological Society meeting in Honolulu, Hawaii, February, 2003.

We are grateful to Howard Ehrlichman, Ph.D., for his helpful comments on this study.

This work was supported, in part, by NIH R01 grant no. MH42172 and subcontract no. DC01150, and by Professional Staff Congress—CUNY Research Awards 66712-00-35 and 65621-00-34 to Queens College.

Notes

¹Please note that among the 24 subjects participating in the current study, only two of these (1 LBD and 1 RBD) were also subjects in the Montreys and Borod (1998) study.

¹percentage of male subjects.

²percentage of Caucasian subjects (the other 50% or 62.5% were African American).

³score on Hollingshead (1977).

⁴F = frontal, P = parietal, T = temporal, CR = corona radiata, SCWM = subcortical white matter (not specified), IC = internal capsule, EC = external capsule.

²The decision was made to exclude accuracy ratings on the non-emotional monologues as it was assumed that it would not be possible to make a specific judgment on the topic of the non-emotional monologues without access to verbal content.

³It should be noted, however, that ratings for accuracy of facial expression were relatively low, perhaps because subjects were required to talk about a particular emotional experience, but not specifically requested to produce facial expressions related to that emotion.