Abstract
Moderate-severe traumatic brain injury (TBI) may result in difficulty with emotion recognition, which has negative implications for social functioning. As aspects of social cognition have been linked to resting-state functional connectivity (RSFC) in the default mode network (DMN), we sought to determine whether DMN connectivity strength predicts emotion recognition and level of social integration in TBI. To this end, we examined emotion recognition ability of 21 individuals with TBI and 27 healthy controls in relation to RSFC between DMN regions. Across all participants, decreased emotion recognition ability was related to increased connectivity between dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) and temporal regions (temporal pole and parahippocampal gyrus). Furthermore, within the TBI group, connectivity between dmPFC and parahippocampal gyrus predicted level of social integration on the Community Integration Questionnaire, an important index of post-injury social functioning in TBI. This finding was not explained by emotion recognition ability, indicating that DMN connectivity predicts social functioning independent of emotion recognition. These results advance our understanding of the neural underpinnings of emotional and social processes in both healthy and injured brains, and suggest that RSFC may be an important marker of social outcomes in individuals with TBI.
Highlights
Our ability to perceive and understand the emotions of others is crucial to successfully navigating social interactions and living in a social milieu
Emotion recognition was inversely associated with connectivity between an regions of interest (ROIs) in dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) and three temporal lobe ROIs: two in left parahippocampal gyrus and one in right temporal pole (Table 3)
There were no significant interactions between emotion recognition performance and group membership on default mode network (DMN) connectivity
Summary
Our ability to perceive and understand the emotions of others is crucial to successfully navigating social interactions and living in a social milieu. Because emotion recognition is a core social cognitive process, those with deficits in this ability—for instance, due to psychiatric condition or disease status—tend to have poorer outcomes in many domains of social functioning, such as successfully communicating with others [1], maintaining occupation [2], and participating in the community [3]. DMN Connectivity and Emotion Recognition in TBI from significant emotion recognition deficits, with the degree of impairment approximating a standard deviation difference from the performance of healthy individuals [6]. In TBI, these emotion recognition impairments predict a number of social, cognitive, and behavioral issues such as deficits in self-awareness, behavioral inhibition and emotion regulation [7, 8], social communication [9], and social competence [7]
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