Right hemisphere emotional perception: Evidence across multiple channels.

TLDR

The study tested whether the right hemisphere is specialized for emotion perception and examined relationships among facial, prosodic, and lexical channels. The authors assessed emotion identification and discrimination across facial, prosodic, and lexical channels in 11 right‑brain‑damaged, 10 left‑brain‑damaged, and 15 normal‑control adults using analogous psychometric tasks and nonemotional controls. Right‑brain‑damaged patients performed significantly worse than left‑brain‑damaged and normal controls on emotion identification across all channels and valences, while discrimination performance was comparable across groups, and these results were unaffected by demographic or clinical variables; correlations among channels were stronger in normal participants than in brain‑damaged groups.

Abstract

Emotional perception was examined in stroke patients across 3 communication channels: facial, prosodic, and lexical. Hemispheric specialization for emotion was tested via right-hemisphere (RH) and valence hypotheses, and relationships among channels were determined. Participants were 11 right-brain-damaged (RBD), 10 left-brain-damaged (LBD), and 15 demographically matched normal control (NC) adults. Experimental measures, with analogous psychometric properties, were identification and discrimination tasks, including a range of positive and negative emotions. Nonemotional control tasks were used for each channel. For identification, RBDs were significantly impaired relative to LBDs and NCs across channels and valences, supporting the RH hypothesis. No group differences emerged for discrimination. Findings were not influenced by demographic, clinical, or control variables. Correlations among the channels were more prominent for normal than for brain-damaged groups.