Facial emotion recognition in patients with focal and diffuse axonal injury

Facial emotion recognition impairment has been well documented in patients with traumatic brain injury. Studies exploring the neural substrates involved in such deficits have implicated specific grey matter structures (e.g. orbitofrontal regions), as well as diffuse white matter damage. Our study aims to clarify whether different types of injuries (i.e. focal vs. diffuse) will lead to different types of impairments on facial emotion recognition tasks, as no study has directly compared these patients.

The present study examined performance and response patterns on a facial emotion recognition task in 14 participants with diffuse axonal injury (DAI), 14 with focal injury (FI) and 22 healthy controls.

We found that, overall, participants with FI and DAI performed more poorly than controls on the facial emotion recognition task. Further, we observed comparable emotion recognition performance in participants with FI and DAI, despite differences in the nature and distribution of their lesions. However, the rating response pattern between the patient groups was different.

This is the first study to show that pure DAI, without gross focal lesions, can independently lead to facial emotion recognition deficits and that rating patterns differ depending on the type and location of trauma.