White Matter Damage Linked To Issues With Emotional Processing: Here's Why

Researchers at the Kessler Foundation have now linked the inability to recognize certain facial affects with white matter damage following a traumatic brain injury (TBI). This could potentially be the first step in understanding emotional deficits that are linked to patterns of white matter damage and gray matter atrophy that are linked to specific impairment of social cognition following a TBI.

Many who deal with a TBI will also have difficulties with emotional processing and social cognition following recovery and thereafter. Later on, they may have difficulties recognizing certain emotions and expressing certain facial features, as well. Furthermore, little is known about the underlying mechanisms of the deficit in facial affect recognition, which may contribute to certain social dysfunctions. A better understanding of these deficits and their manifestations can help to support the developing of effective treatments in the future.

For the study, 42 people with moderate to severe TBI were compared with 23 controls for their ability to identify six emotions, including happiness, sadness, anger, surprise, fear, and shame when shown facial photographs (Facial Emotion Identification Test [FEIT]). Their responses on these facial affect recognition tasks were correlated with neuroimaging changes on diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), which shows the integrity of white matter tracts in the brain.

Researchers found that those in the TBI group performed worse on the FEIT test than those in the control group. There was poor performance on the FEIT associated with lower values for white matter integrity and volume of gray matter as seen on DTI.

"Recent studies have shown that there are impairments in the ability to recognize facial affect after TBI," said Dr. Genova, senior research scientist in Neuropsychology & Neuroscience Research at Kessler Foundation, in a news release. "Using neuroimaging, we found that changes in white and gray matter contributed to failure to accurately identify the emotions expressed in the facial photographs in FEIT. This deficit may adversely affect relationships, hindering social functioning in the home, the community and the workplace. To address this problem, more research needs to focus on deficits in emotional processing, their impact on social functioning, and the added dimension of objective findings on neuroimaging."