Electrodermal responses in patients with unilateral brain damage.
Skin conductance responses (SCR) to emotional and to nonemotional stimuli were measured in 16 right and 16 left unilateral brain-damaged patients. Replicating findings by Morrow, Vrtunski, Kim and Boller (1981), those patients with a lesion in the left hemisphere showed higher SCR's to emotional than to nonemotional stimuli while those with a right lesion showed no difference between them. This pattern of results remained when variance in performance on a Facial Expression Recognition task was partialled out, suggesting that the absence of differentiated arousal in right-brain-damaged patients is unrelated to their impairment in perceptual analysis.
D001143:Arousal; D001925:Brain Damage, Chronic / Q000523:psychology*; D004292:Dominance, Cerebral; D004644:Emotions; D005149:Facial Expression; D005260:Female; D005712:Galvanic Skin Response; D006801:Humans; D008875:Middle Aged; D014796:Visual Perception