中華心理衛生協會

Purpose: The Florida Affect Battery test (FAB) is an assessment tool for measuring the perception and understanding of nonverbal emotional information. It is a test for identifying emotion in facial and tonetic expressions, and it can be used to assess patients who have neurological or psychiatric disorders. Since there is still no standardized test to assess a patient's deficits in emotion recognition and identification of tonetic expression in Taiwan, the aim of this study was to examine the validity of the FAB. We tested 12 patients with prefrontal cortex damage for comparison with healthy participations. Methods: We translated this test from English to Chinese, and recorded tonetic sentences in Chinese. In Study 1, we invited 63 college students (mean age=20) as volunteers and tested them using the FAB and theory of mind tasks. In Study 2, we assessed 12 people (mean age=31) with prefrontal lobe damage individually with the FAB and compared those results to 12 people (mean age=31) with normal brain function. Results and conclusions: The results showed that the content validity of the study had the agreement ranged from .81 to .99, and the agreements of the five emotions were above 80%. As for the criterion related validity, the theory of mind task and the FAB were shown to be related. There was no significant difference between the norms of the US. The scores in identifying facial and tonetic emotions in participants with prefrontal lobe damage were lower than those of participants with normal brain function. The scores were particularly low in identifying sadness and fear in facial expressions and happiness in tone.