Detection of text-based social cues in adults with traumatic brain injury.
Lyn Siobhan Turkstra, Melissa Collins Duff, Adam Michael Politis and 1 others
PMID 28594270WHAT IT FOUND
Adults with moderate-to-severe traumatic brain injury were less accurate than healthy adults at detecting subtle liking cues in simple written sentences.
Their ratings were lower for all but one written sentence and context combination.
Key findings
01On the 16-item comparison task, healthy adults were significantly more likely than adults with TBI to choose statements with immediacy cues as reflecting positive attitudes.
02The difference between groups varied by cue type, but no individual cue type showed a significant group difference.
03Adults with TBI showed reduced sensitivity to both statement immediacy and context immediacy compared with healthy adults.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The written tasks were based on 1970s experimental materials and may not reflect modern texting or email. Only a subset of immediacy cues was tested, and the study did not examine how people produce these cues in conversation. Participants had to pass a reading comprehension screen, and accuracy scores were high in both groups, so the findings may not apply to adults with TBI who have reading or language impairment. The sample was mostly Caucasian and native English speakers, so results may not transfer to other language or cultural groups. The study was not designed to identify why performance differed; social cognition, working memory, attention, and fatigue were discussed but not tested.
Declared interests
The authors declared no conflicts of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that adults with TBI cannot understand social cues in everyday life. Both groups performed well on the written tasks, the stimuli were short fourth-grade sentences, and the study did not test real texting, conversation, or intervention.