Do you feel me? Emotional processing post-traumatic brain injury
Reviewed by Anna Volkmer

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) accounted for just under three million accident and emergency admissions in the US in 2013, with common causes including falls, traffic accidents and assaults. Difficulties processing and expressing affective communication is a common sequela of TBI that impacts on return to work, relationships and quality of social communication. This article provides a review of the current research literature on how speech and language therapists (SLTs) can assess and treat these difficulties in people with TBI. The authors highlight that SLTs often do not assess affect, specifically prosody, facial expressions and linguistic content. There are few assessment batteries that include this, and that present both visual and vocal stimuli to do this. This may take the form of sets of pictures displaying facial expressions displaying emotions, of video clips demonstrating emotional displays that the person with TBI must identify and discriminate the emotional content. The research literature on interventions to manage these areas of difficulty are also sparse and focus mainly on recognition of emotional cues and appropriate responses. This generally comprises multimodal training interventions graduating from decontextualised to contextualised settings. Given that people with TBI are often young and otherwise well, the long-term devastating impact emotional processing should be prioritised in both clinical practice and the research literature. 

Disorders of Emotional Communication in Traumatic Brain Injury.
Wauters L, Marquardt TP.
SEMINARS IN SPEECH AND LANGUAGE
2019;40:13-26.