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Access Type

WSU Access

Date of Award

January 2021

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Department

Communication Sciences and Disorders

First Advisor

Margaret Greenwald

Abstract

This research made a beginning of collecting normative data from healthy volunteers on the comprehension and expression of emotion through a variety of tasks; matching, verification, and emoticon selection. In addition, participants were asked to label the same images they had seen during the matching and verification tasks. Finally, information was gathered on interest in a variety of topics, positive, negative and neutral, for discussion with family and friends versus in a group setting with relative strangers. These data will be utilized in developing an assessment tool designed to evaluate the comprehension and expression of emotion after stroke. Results showed that the matching task was easier and significantly more accurately performed than the verification task. The reaction time for the verification task though, was significantly shorter than for the matching task. Within the matching task, reaction time was shorter for the target emotion-opposite emotion condition versus the target emotion-neutral condition. High accuracy was achieved for the emoticon selection task, though with a noticeable increase in error rates from the 6-emoticon level to the 12-emoticon level. Participants’ consistency for image labels varied, demonstrating more consistency for the neutral images than for the emotional ones. Images that depicted emotional or action complexity had less consistent labels produced by the participants. Overall, the participants were interested in most of the topics suggested, though there was greater interest in positive topics than negative or neutral ones, and a preference for discussing those with family and friends rather than in a group setting with strangers.

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