title: Sensitivity to emotional expressions and situations in organic patients.
abstract: While numerous lines of investigation indicate the pivotal role of the right hemisphere in the apprehension and processing of emotional information, the specific contributions of facial recognition, other visual-spatial capacities, and a general understanding of emotionally-toned situations remains to be delineated. To secure information on the contributions of these various factors, matched groups of brain-damaged patients were required in a series of tests to match with one another faces of the same individual, facial expressions, pictorial versions of emotional situations, and linguistic versions of emotional situations. While patients with left-hemisphere damage evinced special difficulty with linguistically-presented stimuli, patients with right hemisphere damage exhibited an across-the-board reduction in emotional sensitivity, one not restricted to stimuli presented in the visual modality. In addition, right hemisphere patients also displayed a selective tendency to group together emotions of an opposite polarity (positively-toned with negatively-toned emotions). These results suggest that, in addition to its general importance in a range of emotional tasks, the right hemisphere is crucial for an appreciation of the structural relations which obtain among various emotions.
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D001925:Brain Damage, Chronic / Q000523:psychology*; D004292:Dominance, Cerebral; D004644:Emotions; D005149:Facial Expression; D006801:Humans; D008875:Middle Aged; D013067:Speech Perception; D014796:Visual Perception