Measuring Emotions and Emotional Regulation in Patients with Focal Lesions (4b)

Question 1

focal lesions

Answer 1

damage to the brain that can be measured and has very specific area of damage

Question 2

traumatic brain injury (TBI)

Answer 2

may not be considered as a focal lesion, as there might be a possibility of diffusional damage

Question 3

causes of focal lesions

Answer 3

• stroke
• brain aneurysm
• brain haemorrhage
• brain tumour resection
• carbon monoxide poisoning
• encephalitis
• hydrocephalus
• hypoxic/ anoxic
• meningitis

Question 4

when does a stroke occur

Answer 4

when the brain’s blood flow is blocked (87%) and bleeds (13%)

Question 5

emotion in brain injury

Answer 5

• brain injury can often bring about changes in emotions/ emotional regulation
• depression/ anxiety might be linked to brain injury
• frontal damage can affect the ability to regulate one’s emotions
• may be even reduced ability to inhibit
• affected by cognitive flexibility

Question 6

VLSM steps

Answer 6

• draw lesion
• normalise brains
• compute statistics
• threshold statistics
• visualise

Question 7

what is lesion analysis

Answer 7

• mapping area of damage using a software
• MRIcron is most often used
• correlation or regression

Question 8

advantages of lesion mapping

Answer 8

• stronger interface
• understand function of tightly couples network
• clinically relevant

Question 9

problems with overlay plots

Answer 9

• misleading (highlight areas involved with task and areas commonly damaged)
• brain damage is not random - overlay plots highlights these areas of common damage

Question 10

what can statistical plots be used for

Answer 10

to identify areas that reliably predict deficit

Question 11

affect rating dial

Answer 11

• measure emotions in people with lesions
• continuous measure
• easier to indicate rapid changes
• allows researchers to collect online emotion ratings

Question 12

facial action coding system (FACS)

Answer 12

• comprehensive, anatomically based system for describing visually discernible facial movement
• breaks down facial expressions into individual components of muscle movement (action units)

Question 13

social cognition and emotional assessment

Answer 13

• use the stimuli and ask them to respond
• show how to calculate score

Question 14

assessing emotions in rehabilitation

Answer 14

• hospital anxiety and depression scale (Zigmond & Snaith, 1983) = sensitive tool to capture symptoms in acquired brain injury population
• the emotion regulation scale (Gross & John, 2003) = good to capture the use of suppression or reappraisal
• PANAS (Watson & Clark, 1994) = positive and negative affect schedule

Question 15

emotional processing scale (EPS)

Answer 15

25-item questionnaire designed to identify emotional processing styles and potential deficits

Question 16

uses of EPS

Answer 16

• identify and quantify healthy and unhealthy styles of emotional processing
• assess the contribution of poor emotional processing to disorders
• provide a non-diagnostic framework to assess patients for research or therapy
• measure changes in emotions during therapy
• assist therapists in incorporating an emotional component

Question 17

cognitive control assessment

Answer 17

• working memory
• verbal ability = letter fluency and semantic fluency
• inhibition - hayling sentence completion

Question 18

affective story recall re-appraisal task

Answer 18

• Participants shown an emotion word and described an event which caused them to feel that emotion
• they then indicated how intense they felt the emotion on a 0-10 scale, before generating reappraisals and associated intensity measurements