Traumatic brain injury patients: Does frontal brain lesion influence basic emotion recognition?

Abstract

Adequate emotion recognition is relevant to individuals' interpersonal communication. Patients with frontal traumatic brain injury (TBI) exhibit a lower response to facial emotional stimuli, influencing social interactions. In this sense, the main goal of the current study was to assess the ability of TBI patients in recognizing basic emotions. Photographs of facial expressions of five basic emotions (happiness, sadness, fear, anger, and surprise) were presented to 32 TBI patients and 41 healthy controls. Emotion recognition was measured by accuracy and reaction time. Overall performance of the TBI group was poorer than control group for emotion recognition, both in terms of accuracy and reaction time. It is suggested that TBI patients show impairment on emotion recognition, and this relation seems to be moderated by the lesion localization.

Gandra-Barta for the Assessment of Facial Emotion Recognition in Acquired Brain Injury

“…More specifically a study demonstrates that this decrease occurs when there is an interruption in the functioning of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (Vandekerckhove, et al, 2014). The identification of anger was also impaired in the results, corroborating investigations carried out previously (Martins et al 2011;Rosenberg, McDonald, Dethier, Kessels & Westbrook, 2014).…”

“…The response time in this evaluation also appeared to be differentiated between the groups, presenting a greater slowness in the group with acquired brain injury, already demonstrated in a study in which the group with brain injury presented a slower response in the identification of sadness, fear, anger and surprise (Martins et al, 2011). The processing speed of sensory-perceptual information is one of the most common sequelae after brain injury (Madigan, DeLuca, Diamond, Tramontano & Averill, 2000), this leads to a slower decision-making pro cess (Marleen, et al 2003), which may justify the differences in the time of emotional identification between the groups.…”

“…As previously reported, patients with acquired brain injury demonstrate greater difficulty in identifying negative emotions. Contrary to this observation, studies demonstrate the existence of deficits in the identification of happiness (Karow, Marquardt & Marshall, 2001;Braun, Traue, Frisch, Deighton & Kessler, 2005) and the surprise (Martins et al 2011;Vandekerckhove, et al, 2014), as observed in the research results in which the clinical group presented difficulties, not only in the identification of certain negative emotions (anger and disgust) but also in the positive ones (happiness and surprise). This difference may be due to the fact that the sample is not very wide and contains a variety of lesions.…”

“…With regard to strokes (Braun, Traue, Frisch, Deighton & Kessler, 2005;Blonder, Pettigrew & Kryscio, 2012;Cooper et al,2014), lesions in the right hemisphere are more associated with this type of difficulties (Mandal, Tandon & Ashtana, 1991;Kucharska-Pietura, Phillips, Gernand & David, 2003;Yuvaraj, Murugapan, Norlina, Sundaraj & Khairiyan, 2013). Changes in the emotional recognition capacity are equally common in TBI (Spell & Frank, 2000;Milders, Fuchs & Crawford, 2003;Green, Turner & Thompson, 2004;Crocker & McDonald, 2005;Waats & Douglas, 2006;, Zupan, Babbage & Willer, 2007;Ietswaart, Milders, Crawford, Currie & Scott, 2007;Milders, Ietswaart, Crawford & Currie, 2008;Knox & Douglas, 2009;Babbage et al, 2011;Martins et al 2011;Rosenberg, McDonald, Dethier, Kessels & Westbrook, 2014). It is estimated that about 34% of patients with TBI evaluated present deficits in emotional recognition regardless of the type of trauma (Zupan, Babbage, Neumann & Willer, 2014).…”

Reduced empathic concern leads to utilitarian moral judgments in trait alexithymia

“…Patients with damage to ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC, a brain region essential for proper emotional processing), frontal traumatic brain injury patients, and patients suffering from behavioral variant of frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD, which also includes deterioration of frontal lobes) are known to possess uncallous emotionality, shallow social affect, and tend to lack empathy. All of these populations are more likely to endorse utilitarian solutions on high-conflict, personal moral dilemmas (Mendez et al, 2005;Ciaramelli et al, 2007;Koenigs et al, 2007;Mendez and Shapira, 2009;Moretto et al, 2010;Gleichgerrcht et al, 2011;Thomas et al, 2011;Martins et al, 2012;Chiong et al, 2013;Taber-Thomas et al, 2014) than brain-damaged and neurotypical control populations. This is probably because they find the prospect of personally harming someone less emotionally aversive due to reduced empathic response, as shown by reduced skin conductance arousal in vmPFC patients when they face personal moral dilemmas (Moretto et al, 2010) and reduced emotional empathy on self-report measures in bvFTD patients (Gleichgerrcht et al, 2011).…”