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This chapter considers that the systems and structures mediating emotion, how they are affected by traumatic brain injury, and the psychosocial implications of impaired emotion perception. Successful social interaction depends on the ability to perceive, discriminate, and regulate emotion expression in oneself and in others. Changes in our emotional state are conveyed to others through a variety of powerful indicators that have been shown to be universal in character, such as facial expression, body language, posture and tone of voice. Emotions serve to communicate social information about people's thoughts and intentions, thereby helping to mediate social encounters. The ability to recognise emotion in oneself is usually a prerequisite for understanding other people's thoughts, intentions and feelings, a process intrinsic to social cognition. Alexithymia is a personality construct that has been linked to deficits of emotional perception and expression in clinical and non-clinical populations and therefore may help explain deficits of emotion recognition and empathy after traumatic brain injury.
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