Sensitivity to emotion, empathy and theory of mind: adult performance following childhood TBI.

ABSTRACT

PRIMARY OBJECTIVE: To examine deficits in emotion perception for adults who had experienced a traumatic brain injury (TBI) during childhood and investigate relationships between emotion perception skills, empathy and Theory of Mind (ToM). DESIGN: Participants consisted of a random selection of individuals (n = 52) who had previously been recruited for a larger study. All participants had experienced an injury event as a child (0-17 years) (mild TBI, moderate/severe TBI or fractured limb) and were now aged between 18-30 years, with a minimum of 5 years post-injury. METHODS AND PROCEDURE Each participant completed an emotion-sensitivity task, facial expression recognition task, the faux pas test (ToM) and the Interpersonal Reactivity Inventory (IRI Empathy). MAIN OUTCOMES: Individuals with moderate/severe TBI were less sensitive to emotion and less accurate at facial expression recognition than those with mild TBI and orthopaedic controls. Difficulty with affective ToM but not empathy was also found. The emotion-sensitivity and the facial expression recognition tasks were unrelated, with only emotion sensitivity but not expression recognition related to ToM and IRI empathy. CONCLUSIONS: The current findings indicated that deficits in social skills are long lasting and raises the issue of whether intervention to improve sensitivity to genuine emotion can influence more complex social skills and improve quality of social interactions for individuals following TBI.