Facial emotion recognition of older adults with traumatic brain injury.
Lindsey Byom, Melissa Duff, Bilge Mutlu and 1 others
PMID 30526138WHAT IT FOUND
Thirteen older adults with traumatic brain injury had the lowest emotion recognition scores, but only showed a clear difference from younger uninjured adults.
TBI and older age were each linked to poorer recognition, especially for anger and sadness.
Key findings
01Across the sample, participants with TBI and older participants had lower overall emotion recognition scores than uninjured and younger participants.
02The older adults with TBI had the lowest average total scores, but their scores were only lower than the younger uninjured group, not the younger TBI or older uninjured groups.
03Participants with TBI were less accurate than uninjured participants for anger and sadness, but not for disgust, fear, happiness, or surprise.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study was preliminary, with 13 older adults with TBI and small comparison groups, so it may have missed real differences. The older TBI group had the lowest average score, but only differed from younger uninjured adults; do not read this as older TBI being worse than younger TBI or older uninjured adults. The TBI groups were highly variable, and older adults were mostly injured by falls while younger adults were mostly injured in motor vehicle accidents, so injury cause may have affected results. The older participants were age 60 years or older, not necessarily adults in their 70s or 80s, so findings may not extend to much older adults. No treatment was tested, so the paper cannot show that any therapy improves emotion recognition. Because it compared existing groups, it cannot prove that TBI caused the emotion recognition differences.
Declared interests
The supplied text does not include an author conflict-of-interest declaration. The publication types list research support from the N.I.H., Extramural.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that older adults with TBI have worse emotion recognition than younger adults with TBI or older adults without TBI. The older TBI group had the lowest average score, but only showed a clear difference from the younger uninjured group.