title: Emotion Regulation After Traumatic Brain Injury: Distinct Patterns of Sympathetic Activity During Anger Expression and Recognition.
abstract: To assess psychological and psychophysiological correlates of emotion recognition and anger experience in participants with traumatic brain injury (TBI).
  
  
  
  Twenty participants with TBI presenting with anger problems and 22 healthy controls.
  
  
  
  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.
  
  
  
  Skin conductance levels during recall and a self-report anger questionnaire between each condition.
  
  
  
  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.
  
  
  
  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.
authors.affiliation: Division of Neurorehabilitation, Department of Clinical Neurosciences, Geneva University Hospitals, Geneva, Switzerland (Drs Aboulafia-Brakha and Ptak); Laboratory of Cognitive Neurorehabilitation, Department of Clinical Neurosciences, Medical School (Drs Aboulafia-Brakha and Ptak), and Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences (Drs Aboulafia-Brakha and Ptak), University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland; LUNAM University, Laboratory of Psychology (EA 4638), University of Angers, and Neuropsychology Unit, Department of Neurology, University Hospital of Angers, Angers, France (Dr Allain).
authors.forename: Tatiana
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Aboulafia-Brakha
authors.forename: Philippe
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Allain
authors.forename: Radek
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Ptak
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000786:Anger; D001930:Brain Injuries / Q000503:physiopathology / Q000523:psychology*; D016022:Case-Control Studies; D004644:Emotions; D005260:Female; D005712:Galvanic Skin Response; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D013564:Sympathetic Nervous System / Q000503:physiopathology; D055815:Young Adult