Traumatic brain injury (TBI) can lead to impairments in emotion recognition that can present considerable challenges to social communication and the maintenance of interpersonal relationships. This review aimed to estimate the magnitude of emotion recognition impairments in TBI patients overall, and at the emotion category level, and to determine if the magnitude of observed impairments were moderated by modality (e.g., face, voice, multi-modal) of emotional expression, and severity of injury. Searches of PubMed, Scopus, PsycINFO, and Medline databases identified 17 studies which satisfied strict inclusion and exclusion criteria for the systematic review (comparing TBI patients to matched controls). Of these studies, 15 were included in the meta-analysis (NTBI = 474; NControl = 461). Moderate/large average deficits emerged for TBI patients relative to controls (Hedges’ g = 0.79, 95% CI: 0.61 – 0.96, p