Exploring the Use of Isolated Expressions and Film Clips to Evaluate Emotion Recognition by People with Traumatic Brain Injury

The overall goal of this experiment is to compare recognition of isolated and multimodal emotion expressions by people with and without traumatic brain injury. This method can help answer key questions in the field of traumatic brain injury such as, do people with traumatic brain injury have difficulty recognizing emotion in every day situations because of the difficulty they have processing multiple cues simultaneously? The main advantage of this method is that it includes cues that would be generally available in every day situations.

Such as non-verbal cues of the face and the voice, and also situational cues. Helping to demonstrate the procedure will be Miranda Wayland, a research assistant in my laboratory. Begin by having the participant sit in front of a computer with a clear view of the screen.

Give each participant a clip board with the DANVA-Faces response sheet attached. Next, open the DANVA-Faces task in the presentation software and play it using the slideshow view. Inform the participant that they will see a series of human faces on the screen.

Ask them to determine whether the person is happy, sad, angry, or fearful and indicate their answer by circling it on the response sheet. If they are unsure, respond with I don’t know. Start the task with two practice trials in order for the participant to get a sense of the timing of the task.

Ensure that the participant is looking up at the screen. Then, when the face disappears hit enter on the keyboard to move to the next stimulus. Finally, once the practice trials are complete, hit enter to begin the test trials.

Continue to hit enter after each stimulus until all 24 stimuli have been presented. After completion, collect the participant’s response sheet. Begin by sitting the participant in front of the computer.

Provide them with the DANVA-Voices response sheet. Next, open the DANVA-Voices task by going to the following website. Enter any letter for the login, and type EMORYDANVA2 for the password.

Then, click on the green circle in the center of the screen. Inform the participant that they will hear a person say I’m going out of the room now, but I’ll be back later. Ask them to determine whether the person sounds happy, sad, angry, or fearful and indicate their answer by circling it on the response sheet.

If they are unsure of the emotion choose I don’t know. Finally, click fearful and next to advance to the next sentence. After presenting all 24 sentences, collect the response sheet.

Begin by sitting the participant in front of the computer, and provide them with the emotional film clip response sheet. Instruct the participant to pay attention to which emotion they think the character in the film clip is expressing, happy, sad, angry, fearful, or neutral and to report their answer on the response sheet. Open the folder on the computer for the assigned order of the film clip presentation.

Click 01 to open the first film clip. Tell the participant which character to focus on while viewing the clip. Select View full screen to play the clip.

Once the clip has finished playing, ask the participant to answer the questions on the response sheet. Finally, after presenting all 15 film clips, collect the response sheet. In this experiment, participants with TBI were significantly less accurate than controls for recognition of static and vocal emotional expressions.

Although TBI participants were able to recognize positive emotion expressions similarly to controls, they had significantly more difficulty recognizing negative facial and vocal emotion expressions. Furthermore, compared to controls, people with TBI also had significantly more difficulty identifying fearful faces in film clips, and labeling neutral film clips as neutral. Once mastered this technique can be done in 45 to 50 minutes if performed properly.

While attempting this procedure it’s important to inquire about any visual processing difficulties, or fine motor difficulties for people with TBI, so you can seat them accordingly or give them an alternative response format if needed. Following this procedure other methods like playing the film clips with and without the video or with and without the audio can be performed in order to answer additional questions, like which cues are most facilitative and which cues are most problematic when interpreting emotion? After watching this video you should have a good understanding of how to use film clips to assess how people with and without TBI respond to multimodal cues of emotion.