HOW CHILDREN WITH HEAD-INJURY REPRESENT REAL AND DECEPTIVE EMOTION INSHORT NARRATIVES

Narratives are not only about events, but also about the emotions thos e events elicit. Understanding a narrative involves not just the affec tive valence of implied emotional states, but the formation of an expl icit mental representation of those states, in turn, this representati on provides a mechanism that particularizes emotion and modulates its display, which then allows emotional expression to be modified accordi ng to particular contexts. This includes understanding that a characte r may feel an emotion but inhibit its display or even express a decept ive emotion. We studied how 59 school-aged children with head injury a nd 87 normally-developing age-matched controls understand real and dec eptive emotions in brief narratives. Children with head injury showed less sensitivity than controls to how emotions are expressed in narrat ives. While they understood the real emotions in the text, and could r ecall what provoked the emotion and the reason for concealing it, they were less able than controls to identify deceptive emotions. Within t he head injury group, factors such as an earlier age at head injury an d frontal lobe contusions were associated with poor understanding of d eceptive emotions. The results are discussed in terms of the distincti on between emotions as felt and emotions as a cognitive framework for understanding other people's actions and mental states. We conclude th at children with head injury understand emotional communication, the s pontaneous externalization of real affect, but not emotive communicati on, the conscious, strategic modification of affective signals to infl uence others through deceptive facial expressions. (C) 1998 Academic P ress.