Reading emotions after childhood brain injury: Case series evidence of dissociation between cognitive abilities and emotional expression processing skills

Primary objective: A previous study has shown that children with brain injuries are worse than their same age peers at reading emotions. It has not clearly been established that cognitive impairments and emotion processing impairments are dissociable in children and the question of whether emotion-reading skills can be selectively impaired in children after brain injury is explored here. Research design: This study addresses this issue by testing a case series of seven children with brain injuries, who were identified as experiencing emotional or behavioural difficulties, according to a social-behavioural measure. Methods and procedures: A battery of tests of cognitive function and measures that assess ability in reading emotions from faces, voices and eyes was administered to each child. Main outcomes and results: Some cases demonstrate broadly based deficits that affect both cognitive and emotion processing domains, whilst other cases demonstrate highly selective deficits in reading emotions. Conclusions: Based on the profile of results across the cases, this study reports that modality-specific, selective impairments in reading emotional expression can be found in children after brain injury. In addition, the data provide evidence of dissociation between cognitive abilities and emotional expression processing.