EMOTIONAL FACIAL EXPRESSIONS IN INDIVIDUALS WITH TOTAL LARYNGECTOMY.

Purpose: to verify whether there are differences in the degree of intelligibility of individuals with total laryngectomy, using different forms of oral communication (speech whispered, electronic larynx, esophageal voice and tracheoesophagealspeech); verify whether there are differences in facial expression (number and duration of facial movements) in total laryngectomized individuals using different forms of oral communication during spontaneous happy and sad speeches and verify if there are differences in facial expression (number and duration of facial movements) of individuals with high and low intelligibility of spontaneous happy and sad speeches. Methods: treated an exploratory, descriptive and comparative basic methodology cross, and constituted a group of thirteen individuals with total laryngectomy. Subjects were videotaped during both spontaneous happy and sad speeches and evaluated for speech intelligibility for people without pathology of communication, and facial expression analysis was performed using the Facial Action Coding System. We used Statistical Package for the Social Sciences 19for descriptive and inferential analysis, and held the Mann- Whitneyand Kruskall-Wallis statistical tests. Results: we found that different types of communication have varying degrees of intelligibility in speech and descriptively differences in facial expression of laryngectomized subjects during the two different type of speeches used in this study. We also verified statistically significant differences in facial expression in groups of low and high intelligibility, the average duration of each unit of sad eyes in spontaneous speech (p-value=0.01). Conclusion: it was found that the two emotional contexts, the laryngectomy, regardless of their communicative way, are less facially expressive than normofalantes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]