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CWRU STUDY SHOWS HOW BRAIN-INJURED, NORMAL TEENS INTERACT
In a five-year, $344,069 National Institute of Health study, Lyn Turkstra, speech-language pathologist and lead author of a report on adolescent communication in the Journal of Head Trauma Rehabilitation, found that many teens with traumatic brain injuries are unable to read body language and facial expressions or distinguish the emotions of their peers-yet these same teenagers know "the rules" of adolescence, including what it takes to make a teen feel accepted. Turkstra, CWRU assistant professor in the Department of Communication Sciences, said the research also provides much-needed information on how normal adolescents aged 13 to 21 talk to each other. She found that teens share conversation time and have very few misunderstandings about the subject of their talks. While in a group, they may make a lot of physical contact with their peers, but they rarely invade each others' personal space in one-on-one conversations. A typical teen listener raptly looks at the speaker, reading the face for verbal and emotional cues, while the speaker tends to look away, probably to form thoughtful conversation. Brain-injured adolescents break those communication rules, according to Turkstra. They violate space by putting their hands on their friends in one-on-one conversations, immediately sending up "a red flag warning," she said. Once they start speaking, they may monopolize the conversation and don't know when to stop. As listeners, youths with brain injuries also may not look at the speaker, which relays a message of being disinterested and results in missing cues about the emotional overtones of the conversation apparent in the body language and facial expressions of the speakers. Many youth with brain injuries misinterpreted the speaker's emotions, with mistakes that include confusing anger for happiness, says Turkstra. The researchers also found that teens who suffer a brain injury during their adolescent years do not see themselves as different from their peers and cannot identify with other brain-injured youths. This makes intervention support groups hard to form. The results of the study are based in part on a videotape test, which was developed by the researchers, that detects how well an adolescent picks up social cues and in part on interviews with more than 80 adolescents, according to Turkstra. The research also helps explain why adolescents do not feel the full effects of brain injuries until adulthood and will go toward designing new therapies and support groups to help teens regain the social skills of adolescent life. With the help of a $10,000 grant from CWRU's Schubert Center for Child Development, the researchers will now study the same social processes using neuroimaging techniques in order to learn more about how the brains of adolescents with and without injuries process social information.
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