Citation

Ryan NP, Anderson V, Godfrey C, Beauchamp MH, Coleman L, Eren S, Rosema S, Taylor K, Catroppa C. J. Neurotrauma 2014; 31(7): 649-657.

Affiliation

Murdoch Childrens Research Institute, Child Neuropsychology, Critical Care and Neurosciences, Flemington Road , Parkville, Victoria, Australia, 3052 ; nicholas.ryan@mcri.edu.au.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2014, Mary Ann Liebert Publishers)

DOI

10.1089/neu.2013.3153

PMID

24147615

Abstract

Emotion perception forms an integral part of social communication, and is critical to attain developmentally appropriate goals. This skill, which emerges relatively early in development is driven by increasing connectivity among regions of a distributed socio-cognitive neural network, and may be vulnerable to disruption from early childhood TBI. The present study aimed to evaluate the very long-term impact of childhood TBI on emotion perception, as well as examine the contribution of injury and non-injury related risk and resilience factors to variability in socio-cognitive outcomes. 34 young adult survivors of early childhood TBI (M age= 20.62 years; M time since injury: 16.55 years) and 16 typically developing controls matched for age, gender and socio-economic status (SES) were assessed using tasks that required recognition and interpretation of facial and prosodic emotional cues. Survivors of severe childhood TBI were found to have significantly poorer emotion perception than controls and young adults with mild to moderate injuries. Furthermore, poorer emotion perception was associated with reduced volume of the posterior corpus callosum, the presence of frontal pathology, lower socio-economic status (SES), and a less intimate family environment. Our findings lend support to the vulnerability of the immature 'social brain' network to early disruption, and underscore the need for context-sensitive rehabilitation that optimizes early family environments to enhance recovery of emotion perception skills after childhood TBI.

Language: en