Comparing Emotional Facial Expressions Produced During Personal Narrative Discourse by People With and Without Aphasia

PURPOSE: This preliminary study aimed to (a) determine whether the frequency and intensity of emotional facial expressions during personal narrative discourse are different for people with aphasia (PWA) than for adults without aphasia and (b) explore the relationship between the frequency and intensity of emotional facial expressions and aphasia severity. METHOD: Fifty-two participants, including 26 PWA and 26 control participants, were randomly selected from Aphasia Bank, a protocoled database with video recordings of both people with and without aphasia. Two video-recorded narrative discourse samples, a stroke/illness story and an important life event story, from each participant were used. Two human coders were trained utilizing a modified Facial Expression Coding System to identify emotional facial expressions according to valence (positive/negative) and intensity (perceptual scale from 1 to 4). Dependent variables included the frequency and intensity of positive and negative facial expressions. RESULTS: Linear mixed-effects models revealed that female participants produced more positive facial expressions per minute than did male participants. Overall, PWA produced less intense positive facial expressions compared with control participants. Pearson correlational analyses revealed no statistically significant correlation between the severity and frequency or intensity of emotional facial expressions. CONCLUSIONS: During discourse, PWA may produce less intense emotional facial expressions compared with their peers due to allocating more attentional resources toward language production or simply as the result of left-hemisphere damage. Future research should replicate and expand on these findings while integrating tasks specifically designed to elicit emotional facial expressions during discourse.