Emotional versus nonemotional lexical perception in patients with right and left brain damage

Objective: This study examined lexical emotional perception in patients wit h unilateral brain damage. Background: Hypotheses pertaining to laterality and emotion were tested. More specifically, we were interested in whether t he right hemisphere is dominant for verbally-presented emotion. In addition , we examined whether emotional content improves the performance of patient s with left brain damage (LBD) and language deficits. Method: Subjects were 11 patients with right brain damage (RBD), 10 patients with LED, and 15 no rmal control adults. The subject groups did not differ significantly on dem ographic or basic cognitive variables; the patient groups were similar on n eurologic variables. Parallel emotional experimental and nonemotional contr ol tasks included word identification (or recognition), sentence identifica tion, and word discrimination. There were eight emotional categories (e.g., happiness) and eight nonemotional categories (e.g., vision). Results: A si gnificant interaction among Group, Condition, and Task revealed that patien ts with RED were significantly impaired relative to patients with LED and n ormals within the emotional condition, particularly for the identification tasks. Furthermore, the performance of patients with LED and language defic its was improved by emotional content for the sentence identification task. Conclusions: These findings suggest that the right hemisphere has a unique contribution in the identification of lexical emotional stimuli. Implicati ons for rehabilitation of patients with LED and language deficits and patie nts with RED by means of emotion-based strategies are discussed.