PROCESSING OF EMOTIONAL KANJI WORDS IN TH E RIGHT-HEMISPHERE AND THE EFFECT OF HANDEDNESS ON THE PROCESSING

Experimental and clinical evidence indicates that the right hemisphere plays a special role in the processing of non-verbal emotional materi al. The possibility that verbal material may also be similarly process ed in the investigated with a reading aloud task, with unilateral tach istoscopic presentation of emotional and Right-handed subjects, both m ale and female, participated in Experiment 1 and right:ts of both sexe s in Experiment 2. Results of Experiment 1 showed that responses to no n-emotional kanji words were more accurate in the right visual field t han in the left, but no difference was found for emotional words. Resu lts of Experiment 2 showed the word-emotionality by visual-field inter action effect on accuracy of both right-and left-handed subjects, but the effect was more pronounced for the right-handed. The results sugge st that the right hemisphere processes emotional kanji words just as w ell as the left.