Affective processing in left and right hemisphere brain-damaged subjects with and without subcortical involvement

Affective processing ability was examined in right and left hemisphere brai n-damaged subjects with cortical lesions that were grouped according to the presence or absence of concomitant subcortical basal ganglia damage. The a bility to process affective speech prosody, emotional facial expressions, a nd linguistically coded emotional messages was measured in isolated identif ication tasks. Results indicated that subjects with damage to subcortical s tructures in addition to cortical left or right hemisphere brain damage had difficulty processing emotional words, facial expressions, and prosodic in tonations. Subjects with cortical damage only, regardless of side of lesion (left or right), performed without significant difficulty across all tasks . There were hemispheric differences found in the cortical-subcortical grou ps. The left cortical-subcortical subjects had the greatest difficulty proc essing linguistic information and the right cortical-subcortical subjects h ad the most difficulty processing facial expression and prosodic informatio n. Findings support the connection between higher- and lower-order brain st ructures in processing messages that are affectively coded.