The Emotional Lexicon and Its Correlates Following Traumatic Brain Injury

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) can often influence the way subjects process and cope with their emotional life. In spite of the huge amount of studies investigating facial emotion recognition in subjects with traumatic brain injury, none of them has examined if their emotional lexicon, i.e. the ability to express emotions through words, may be affected. In this case-control study, we investigated the emotional lexicon of a group of 16 severe TBI subjects, comparing their performances with an healthy control group. A set of 25 visual stimuli (10 single picture images, 5 cartoon story pictures and 10 video clips) were selected. All the stimuli were chosen for their high emotional content by ten blind judges. The participants were asked to describe the stimuli, focusing on their emotional content. To get a better understanding of the correlates of emotional lexicon, all the participants were administered with the backward version of the Digit Span test, the Ekman and Friesen 60 Faces, the 20-Item Toronto Alexithymia Scale and the Empathy Quotient. Results pointed out a significant difference between TBI subjects and healthy controls only for cartoon story and video clip description. Conversely, TBI subjects performed similarly to controls when asked to describe the single picture images. A significant correlation was found in TBI subjects between the results of the Digit Span and number of emotional words, while no correlation was detected between emotional terms and the three scales used to assess TBI subjects’ emotional profile. These outcomes highlight that, for more complex stimuli, difficulties in emotional lexicon may depend on factors other than empathy, alexythimia or emotion recognition. These difficulties seem to be related to reduced working memory capacity, which prevent the subjects from correctly processing the emotional content of stimuli.