HEMISPHERIC-SPECIALIZATION FOR DISCOURSE REPORTS OF EMOTIONAL EXPERIENCES - RELATIONSHIPS TO DEMOGRAPHIC, NEUROLOGICAL, AND PERCEPTUAL VARIABLES

This study examined hemispheric specialization for discourse reports o f 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 eti ology, months post-CVA onset, and intrahemispheric lesion location. Su bjects were requested to produce monologues about positive and negativ e emotional and nonemotional experiences. The lexical content of writt en transcriptions of these monologues was later rated for ''emotionali ty'' by naive judges. Overall, RBDs described experiences with less em otional intensity than did NCs and LBDs, providing support for right h emisphere involvement in lexical emotion. Although the RBDs in the cur rent study demonstrated similar patterns of deficits in a prior study [9] on tasks involving lexical emotional perception, there were no sig nificant relationships between the current measures of emotional expre ssion and the previous measures of emotional perception. Finally, the expression and the perception data were examined with respect to intra hemispheric factors. Among the brain-damaged subjects, subcortical str uctures were more involved in reports of emotional experience, and cor tical structures were more involved in the perception of emotion.