Emotion recognition problems after brain injury: Development of the Brief Emotion Recognition Test (BERT)

Abstract

Difficulty recognising emotion can have a major impact on psychosocial outcome following acquired brain injury. The need to have an easily administered screening test which enables clinicians to quickly assess this ability has been identified. In this thesis, the development of the Brief Emotion Recognition Test (BERT) is described. It is anticipated that the BERT will provide a reliable and valid screening measure for emotion recognition problems after acquired brain injury. The test consists of 14 short video clips of actors portraying positive, negative and neutral emotions. After watching each video clip viewers are asked to choose which emotion was being portrayed from a list of six emotions (happy, sad, surprise, anger, fear, disgust) and neutral. Half of the clips include facial expressions only (no phrase) and the other half include facial expressions and vocal cues in the form of neutral carrier phrases (with phrase). The performance of 92 neurologically healthy adults was compared with that of 20 adults who had sustained moderate-to-severe brain injury. Validity and reliability of the test were assessed. Test-retest reliability was good. The BERT has good discriminant and concurrent reliability. There was a statistically significant difference in performance (p