Measuring emotion perception following traumatic brain injury: The Complex Audio Visual Emotion Assessment Task (CAVEAT).

INTRODUCTION

While emotion recognition difficulties in moderate-severe TBI are well established, the standard measures of emotion recognition significantly limit the conclusions which can be drawn regarding real-life deficits. Two studies report on the development of CAVEAT, a new measure of emotion recognition that attempts to overcome these limitations.

METHOD

These studies were designed to establish CAVEAT's psychometric properties by examining performance of a TBI group and matched controls in order to provide estimates of its reliability and validity (study 1), and to compare performance of the TBI and control groups on a subgroup of emotions from the CAVEAT that represented the six basic emotions used in conventional emotion research (study 2). Thirty-two participants with TBI and 32 matched controls (study 1) and 16 participants with TBI and 12 matched controls (study 2) participated in this study.

RESULTS

CAVEAT demonstrated high construct validity and internal consistency. Performance on the subgroup of "basic" six emotions was largely similar to the rates reported in the literature.

CONCLUSIONS

These findings provided some evidence for the psychometric properties of CAVEAT, indicating that it can be used as a clinical test for assessing emotion recognition in people with moderate-severe TBI.