Emotion Regulation After Traumatic Brain Injury: Distinct Patterns of Sympathetic Activity During Anger Expression and Recognition

Abstract

Objective: To assess psychological and psychophysiological correlates of emotion recognition and anger experience in participants with traumatic brain injury (TBI).

Participants: Twenty participants with TBI presenting with anger problems and 22 healthy controls.

Procedures: Participants were administered tasks assessing emotion recognition (The French Evaluation Task) and anger expression (Anger regulation task). The latter, designed to elicit and modulate anger feelings through verbal recall of a self-experienced event, involved 4 recall conditions that followed a resting period: neutral, uninstructed anger recall, anger rumination, and anger reappraisal.

Measures: Skin conductance levels during recall and a self-report anger questionnaire between each condition.

Results: In the TBI and control groups, self-reported anger was similarly modulated across emotion regulation conditions. However, only in the TBI group did skin conductance levels significantly increase between neutral and uninstructed anger recall conditions.

Conclusions: Impaired emotion regulation in TBI participants could be related to increased levels of autonomic system activity during emotional experience. However, anger feelings in these participants can also be modulated with the use of emotion regulation strategies, including adaptive strategies such as reappraisal. Thus, promoting awareness and management of physiological activation and encouraging cognitive restructuring can be recommended as a component of interventions targeting emotion regulation in TBI patients.