Hemispheric specialization for discourse reports of emotional experiences: Relationships to demographic, neurological, and perceptual variables

This study examined hemispheric specialization for discourse reports of emotional and nonemotional experience in 16 right-brain-damaged (RED), 16 left-brain-damaged (LED), and 16 demographically-matched normal control (NC) right-handed adults. Patient groups did not differ on etiology, months post-CVA onset, and intrahemispheric lesion location. Subjects were requested to produce monologues about positive and negative emotional and nonemotional experiences. The lexical content of written transcriptions of these monologues was later rated for ''emotionality'' by naive judges. Overall, RBDs described experiences with less emotional intensity than did NCs and LBDs, providing support for right hemisphere involvement in lexical emotion. Although the RBDs in the current study demonstrated similar patterns of deficits in a prior study [9] on tasks involving lexical emotional perception, there were no significant relationships between the current measures of emotional expression and the previous measures of emotional perception. Finally, the expression and the perception data were examined with respect to intrahemispheric factors. Among the brain-damaged subjects, subcortical structures were more involved in reports of emotional experience, and cortical structures were more involved in the perception of emotion.