Emotional disorders are common in people with brain damage. It is often difficult to determine whether such disorders are a result of a deficit in recognition, expression, or regulation of emotion due to brain damage per se, or if they are reactive to other functional limitations. The Victoria Emotion Recognition Test (VERT) was developed to provide a standardized tool for the assessment of deficits in the recognition of facial and tonal affect. The VERT was constructed on the basis of neurophysiological and behavioural theories of emotion and neuropsychological theories of agnosia. The VERT consists of three subtests in which four emotions (angry, sad, happy and afraid) are presented at three levels of intensity. The visual subtest presents photographs of faces; the auditory subtest, audiotaped voice clips; and the auditory/visual subtest, both photographs and voice clips. Psychometric results of the standardization studies suggest that the VERT measures an aspect of the recognition of facial and tonal emotion that is independent of more basic skills in face recognition and auditory nonverbal memory. The theoretical construct of recognition of emotion was investigated within the framework of an "affective agnosia". The results suggest that a broader concept of agnosia is necessary in order to include failures in recognition of emotion within this framework. / Graduate