People who have experienced moderate to severe traumatic brain injury (TBI) often experience deficits in social cognition, including emotion recognition, which can negatively impact their social functioning. While previous research has provided insight into the challenges of face-to-face communication among people with TBI, little is known about the impact of TBI on the recognition of emotions depicted by emojis. Although emojis provide nonverbal cues about emotion, their interpretation is not always clear. Demographic factors such as sex and age may also affect emoji perception, but further research is needed to fully understand how different factors influence the recognition of emotions in emoji among people with TBI.
This study aimed to investigate whether people with TBI have difficulties in recognizing emotions depicted by emoji, and whether this difficulty parallels deficits in recognizing emotions on faces. Researchers compared how well people with and without TBI recognized basic and social emotions, as displayed in both human faces and emojis. The study included 51 individuals with TBI and 51 people without TBI who completed a static facial recognition task and an emoji recognition task. The researchers found that:
- Both groups had lower accuracy when labeling emotions depicted by emoji compared to emotion depicted by faces. Both groups had the most difficulty recognizing emojis depicting fear and disgust (basic emotions). Fear was often confused with surprise and disgust was often confused with anger.
- People with TBI were less accurate in recognizing social emotions (e.g., anxiety) depicted by emojis than basic emotions depicted by emojis.
- People without TBI were less confident than people with TBI when rating emotions depicted by emojis than by faces, potentially reflecting a lack of awareness for social deficits.
- There was no significant effect between men and women on accuracy.
Emojis can change the interpretation of communications. Understanding how emojis can facilitate social communication in people with TBI can provide new insights into potential interventions to support post injury social participation and vocational reintegration. Going forward, it will be important to understand how people with TBI adapt to communication environments with diminished cues or in environments where they experience deficiencies in social perception.
Clough S, Morrow E, Mutlu B, Turkstra L, Duff MC. Emotion recognition of faces and emoji in individuals with moderate-severe traumatic brain injury. Brain Injury. (April 2023).