Measuring emotion perception following traumatic brain injury: The Complex Audio Visual Emotion Assessment Task (CAVEAT).

INTRODUCTION: While emotion recognition difficulties in moderate-severe TBI are well established, the standard measures of emotion recognition significantly limit the conclusions which can be drawn regarding real-life deficits. Two studies report on the development of CAVEAT, a new measure of emotion recognition that attempts to overcome these limitations. METHOD: These studies were designed to establish CAVEAT's psychometric properties by examining performance of a TBI group and matched controls in order to provide estimates of its reliability and validity (study 1), and to compare performance of the TBI and control groups on a subgroup of emotions from the CAVEAT that represented the six basic emotions used in conventional emotion research (study 2). Thirty-two participants with TBI and 32 matched controls (study 1) and 16 participants with TBI and 12 matched controls (study 2) participated in this study. RESULTS: CAVEAT demonstrated high construct validity and internal consistency. Performance on the subgroup of "basic" six emotions was largely similar to the rates reported in the literature. CONCLUSIONS: These findings provided some evidence for the psychometric properties of CAVEAT, indicating that it can be used as a clinical test for assessing emotion recognition in people with moderate-severe TBI.

Daily access to sucrose impairs aspects of spatial memory tasks reliant on pattern separation and neural proliferation in rats.

High sugar diets reduce hippocampal neurogenesis, which is required for minimizing interference between memories, a process that involves "pattern separation." We provided rats with 2 h daily access to a sucrose solution for 28 d and assessed their performance on a spatial memory task. Sucrose consuming rats discriminated between objects in novel and familiar locations when there was a large spatial separation between the objects, but not when the separation was smaller. Neuroproliferation markers in the dentate gyrus of the sucrose-consuming rats were reduced relative to controls. Thus, sucrose consumption impaired aspects of spatial memory and reduced hippocampal neuroproliferation.