Sex Differences in Emotion Recognition and Emotional Inferencing Following Severe Traumatic Brain Injury

Abstract

The primary objective of the current study was to determine if men and women with traumatic brain injury (TBI) differ in their emotion recognition and emotional inferencing abilities. In addition to overall accuracy, we explored whether differences were contingent upon the target emotion for each task, or upon high and low intensity facial and vocal emotion expressions. 160 participants (116 men) with severe TBI completed three tasks -a task measuring facial emotion recognition (DANVA-Faces), vocal emotion recognition (DANVA-Voices) and one measuring emotional inferencing (EIST). Results showed that women with TBI were significantly more accurate in their recognition of vocal emotion expressions, and also for emotional inferencing. Further analyses of task performance showed women were significantly better than men at recognizing fearful facial expressions, and also facial emotion expressions high in intensity. Women also displayed increased response accuracy for sad vocal expressions, and low intensity vocal emotion expressions. Analysis of the EIST task showed that women were more accurate than men at emotional inferencing in sad and fearful stories.

Different aspects of facial affect recognition impairment following traumatic brain injury: The role of perceptual and interpretative abilities

“…This would include the contextual knowledge of when it is appropriate to experience a certain affect (e.g., when receiving a present, a person would usually be happy; when being chased by a rabid dog, they would be scared). The affective semantic system is often assessed using emotional inference tasks, in which participants are asked to assign a vignette or a short story (context) to the affect that it is likely to elicit (Croker and McDonald, 2005; Barbra Zupan, Babbage, Neumann, & Willer, 2016; B. Zupan, Neumann, Babbage, & Willer, 2015).…”

Sex and Gender Differences in Emotion Recognition and Theory of Mind After TBI: A Narrative Review and Directions for Future Research

“…The literature search yielded three papers (26,46,47) that examined sex differences in social cognition in adults with TBI. Two additional papers reported scores separately for women and men with TBI (41,42).…”

Interpretation of non‐verbal cues by people with and without TBI: understanding relationship intentions

“…Previous literature has clearly established that people with TBI, as a group, have difficulty labelling facial expressions (Zupan et al . ), interpreting deictic gestures combined with verbal hints to understand indirect requests (Evans and Hux ), understanding social inferences that combine verbal and non‐verbal information (McDonald et al . ), and interpreting the mental states of others in laboratory tasks and in conversation with familiar partners (Byom and Turkstra ).…”

“…This outcome is contrary to the researcher's hypothesis that people with TBI would misinterpret the non-verbal cues, thus providing different relationship closeness ratings than their typical comparison peers. Previous literature has clearly established that people with TBI, as a group, have difficulty labelling facial expressions (Zupan et al 2017), interpreting deictic gestures combined with verbal hints to understand indirect requests (Evans and Hux 2010), understanding social inferences that combine verbal and non-verbal information (McDonald et al 2003), and interpreting the mental states of others in laboratory tasks and in conversation with familiar partners (Byom and Turkstra 2012). However, methodological differences may help to illuminate the conflicting findings between previous literature and the current study.…”

“…Broad social cognition processes include emotion processing (e.g., facial and prosodic expression) and Theory of Mind (ToM) (Mc-Donald 2013). Impairments in social cognition in people with TBI are well established, and include difficulty recognizing emotion in facial expression and prosody (Babbage et al 2011, Zupan et al 2017, Bird and Parente 2014, understanding sarcasm, humour, irony and deceit (Channon et al 2005, Angeleri et al 2008, and understanding the mental state of others (Honan et al 2015, Byom andTurkstra 2012).…”