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Contributions of the Right Cerebral Hemisphere in Perceiving Paralinguistic Cues of Emotion
Abstract
Discoveries in neurology and linguistics indicate that many aspects of human language are determined by specific structural features of the brain, a notion which differs radically from the more prevalent idea of language being an arbitrary, culturally evolved set of symbols and combinatorial rules which during development somehow become represented upon an infinitely malleable nervous system. The present study has attempted to examine whether such neurological specification might extend to other aspects of our social interactions as well, particularly the communication of affect through paralinguistic cues. But before describing the rationale for our own studies, it might be best to mention a little more about spoken language.
... One, in more than numerous studies, 'communication' is taken for granted in one of its two commonsense meanings 11 and, on that basis, subclasses of communication phenomena are defined and studied, practices examined, or connections between disciplines considered. For example, Benowitz et al. (1984Benowitz et al. ( *1985 on the communication of affect on the basis of paralinguistic cues; Sass (1984Sass ( *1985 on communication patterns as revealing factors in the etiology of schizophrenia; Scott (1996) on the institutional practices that may lead to a special case of communication failure ("inadvertent pathologies"). Murray (1998) on the connections between literacy and cybernetics. ...
... One, in more than numerous studies, 'communication' is taken for granted in one of its two commonsense meanings 11 and, on that basis, subclasses of communication phenomena are defined and studied, practices examined, or connections between disciplines considered. For example, Benowitz et al. (1984Benowitz et al. ( *1985 on the communication of affect on the basis of paralinguistic cues; Sass (1984Sass ( *1985 on communication patterns as revealing factors in the etiology of schizophrenia; Scott (1996) on the institutional practices that may lead to a special case of communication failure ("inadvertent pathologies"). Murray (1998) on the connections between literacy and cybernetics. ...
The paper states that cybernetics has failed to live up to its dream as an interdisciplinary field unifying all the phenomena within the vast space of animals and machines. It reminds the reader of the cybernetic dream, the related aspirations in the fields of cognitive science and social theory and the overall aim of the unity of science movement. It briefly argues that ignoring communication and adopting continuous systems as its class of systems for theory construction (CSTC) was bound to lead cybernetics to the abandonment of its dream and points out that cognitive science may well be heading the same way. A proposed conception of communication that is both rich enough to be used as a unifying theoretical construct and general enough to cut across all disciplines studying “communication”. On that basis some major implications are outlined. The paper concludes with a brief note on the impact of our conception of communication on the structure of human society.
... Identification with interaction (e.g., Katz and Danet 1973). Identification with its two commonsense meanings, (e.g., Arlington and Baird's 2005; Benowitz et al. 1984Benowitz et al. *1985Murray (1998); Sass (1984Sass ( *1985; Scott (1996); Tomasello et al 2005). 27 "[A]ny exchange of messages between human beings" (e.g., Runcan 1985). ...
I propose a new approach to the constitutive problem of psychology 'what is mind?' The first section introduces modifications of the received scope, methodology, and evaluation criteria of unified theories of cognition in accordance with the requirements of evolutionary compatibility and of a mature science. The second section outlines the proposed theory. Its first part provides empirically verifiable conditions delineating the class of meaningful neural formations and modifies accordingly the traditional conceptions of meaning, concept and thinking. This analysis is part of a theory of communication in terms of inter-level systems of primitives that proposes the communication-understanding principle as a psychological invariance. It unifies a substantial amount of research by systematizing the notions of meaning, thinking, concept, belief, communication, and understanding and leads to a minimum vocabulary for this core system of mental phenomena. Its second part argues that written human language is the key characteristic of the artificially natural human mind. Overall, the theory both supports Darwin's continuity hypothesis and proposes that the mental gap is within our own species.
... Many RHD patients fail to explicitly recognize nonverbal affective signals, and some data suggest that they fail on indirect affect tasks as well (Greve, Bauer, & Bowers, 1991). Similar hemispheric asymmetries in evaluations of nonverbal affective signals have been described in patients with callosal sections (Benowitz, Bear, Rosenthal, Zaidel, & Sperry, 1983;Benowitz et al., 1984), in patients undergoing intracarotid sodium amytal injections (Ahern et al., 1991), and in normal individuals when various laterality paradigms have been used (i.e., tachistoscopic, chimeric, and hemiface composite tasks or dichotic listening tasks). Cross-sectional studies suggest that the magnitude of affect laterality effects remains stable from early to late adulthood (Moreno, Borod, Welkowitz, & Alpert, 1990) and may reflect stable, as opposed to purely attentional, properties of the right hemisphere (David, 1991). ...
Reviews evidence from neuropsychological studies of affect perception, which suggest that the right hemisphere contains a vocabulary of nonverbal affective signals (facial expressions, prosody, and gestures). This vocabulary is referred to as the nonverbal affect lexicon, and evidence is reviewed suggesting that it is modular in organization, with independent lexicons for faces and prosody. The authors feel that affect lexicon represents one component of a cortically based affect-processing network that is dedicated to reading the nonverbal social displays of other members of the species. Discordances between this cortical affect system and other components of the emotion enterprise are discussed, as well as the relationship of the nonverbal affect lexicon to valence-related asymmetries. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Three complete commissurotomy subjects were tested for the ability to integrate cognitive information presented for a prolonged duration to opposite visual hemi-fields. A sample stimulus was projected to one hemi-field and a three-choice array to the other, with one choice related to the sample on an abstract or concrete basis. All subjects performed the non-verbal matching task at well above chance level, with scores comparable to those attained when the task was performed completely within one or the other hemisphere. Transfer was equally successful in the two directions, though the pathway originating in the right and terminating in the left hemisphere may be more sensitive to affective components of the stimulus. The information relayed subcortically is neither verbal nor imagic in nature, but appears to correspond to contextual or connotative associates of the stimulus. The results are discussed in terms of a cognitive system common to the two hemispheres and involving associational networks but not lateralized functions such as language and complex visuospatial processes.
Physiologic theories of emotion suggest that activation is important in the experience of emotion; patients exhibiting "neglect" as a consequence of right parietotemporal of dysfunction show flattened affect. We studied arousal in patients with lesions of the right hemisphere who also exhibited emotional indifference, in aphasic patients with lesions of the left hemisphere, and in non-brain-damaged controls, by stimulating the forearm ipsilateral to the side of the brain lesion while recording galvanic skin responses (GSRs) from the fingers on the same side. The group exhibiting neglect had lower GSRs than aphasic patients or non-brain-damaged controls. Aphasic patients had higher GSRs than non-brain-damaged controls. These results suggest that neglect is associated with disturbances in bilateral arousal and that this disorder of arousal may be responsible in part for flattened affect. The heightened GSR in aphasic patients may reflect disinhibition, which might be partly responsible for increased emotionality in these patients.
Hughlings Jackson noted that, although some aphasic patients were unable to use propositional speech, affective speech appeared to be spared. The purpose of this experiment was to study patients with unilateral hemispheric disease in order to ascertain if there are hemispheric asymmetries in the comprehension of affective speech. Six subjects had right temporoparietal lesions (left unilateral neglect) and six subjects had left temporoparietal lesions (fluent aphasias). These subjects were presented with 32 tape recorded sentences. In 16 trials the patients were asked to judge the emotional mood of the speaker (happy, sad, angry, indifferent) and in 16 trials the patients were asked to judge the content. Line drawings containing facial expressions of the four emotions or line drawings corresponding with the four basic contents were displayed with each sentence and the patient responded by pointing. All 12 subjects made perfect scores on the content portion of the test. On the emotional portion the right hemispheric patients scored a mean of 4-17 and the left hemispheric group scored a mean 10-17. The difference between these means is significantly (P less than 0-01) and suggests that patients with right hemispheric dysfunction and neglect have a defect in the comprehension of affective speech.
Studies employing schematic faces of three features explored the role of the left hemisphere as an analytic processor in difficult discriminations and the role of the right hemisphere in easy gestalt matches. In a discrimination task, the successively presented members of a stimulus pair differed in all three features. When both stimuli went to the same visual field there was a Visual Field X Judgments interaction; judgments same were processed faster in the left visual field. When a test stimulus differing on all three features from a previously memorized target face was matched to the latter, both judgments same and different were made faster for stimuli in the left visual field. However, when the test stimulus and the memory items differed on only one feature the right field proved superior for both judgments same and different.
According to K. S. Lashley (1951) and U. Neisser (1967), models of speech cognition frequently stress a rhythmic organizing principle, indicating that speech processing is intimately related to the processing of rhythmic patterns. However, in agreement with clinical data, dichotic listening studies establish that while speech stimuli are processed by the left hemisphere, other nonspeech auditory stimuli are processed by the right. Challenging this distinction, the present study shows that nonspeech rhythmic patterns carrying no phonetic information are processed by the same hemisphere as speech. 24 college students with normal hearing listened to 30 dichotic pairs of rhythmic pure-tone patterns. In a counterbalanced, forced-choice recognition task, Ss were able to correctly identify the patterns heard in the right ear significantly more often than the left. Results suggest that since rhythmic patterns are the only nonspeech auditory stimuli to share the processing of the left hemisphere with speech, models involving rhythmic organization in speech cognition are to be encouraged. Since both speech and rhythm require hierarchical organization, it is likely that the left hemisphere is better able to process hierarchically.
Studied the communication of affect through spontaneous facial expressions with 10 pairs of female undergraduates and 9 pairs of males. Sender Ss watched 25 slides designed to elicit affect while Os watched the sender's face over television and made judgments about the nature and intensity of the affect. Skin conductance and heart rate were recorded from both sender and O. Results reveal significant communication of affect, particularly among the female pairs. Relationships between the communication process, personality measures, and physiological responding were explored, and a negative relationship was found between the sender's skin conductance responding and communication accuracy. (32 ref.)
The coming of language occurs at about the same age in every healthy child throughout the world, strongly supporting the concept that genetically determined processes of maturation, rather than environmental influences, underlie capacity for speech and verbal understanding. Dr. Lenneberg points out the implications of this concept for the therapeutic and educational approach to children with hearing or speech deficits.
"62 PATIENTS WITH UNILATERAL CORTICAL LESIONS WERE GIVEN 2 TESTS OF FACIAL RECOGNITION, WHICH REQUIRED RECOGNITION OF WELL-KNOWN FACES AND RECOGNITION FROM IMMEDIATE MEMORY OF PREVIOUSLY UNKNOWN FACES. THE RIGHT HEMISPHERE GROUP WAS IMPAIRED RELATIVE TO THE LEFT HEMISPHERE GROUP ON BOTH TESTS. IN NEITHER GROUP WAS THERE A SIGNIFICANT CORRELATION BETWEEN THE SCORES ON THE 2 TASKS, INDICATING THAT THE TASKS WERE TESTS OF SEPARATE AND DISTINCT FUNCTIONS. THE RESULTS ARE DISCUSSED IN TERMS OF THE CLINICAL SYNDROME, PROSOPAGNOSIA. IT IS SUGGESTED THAT PROSOPAGNOSIA MAY BE A CONSTITUENT OF AN AMNESIC SYNDROME." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
One-hundred-and-twenty-eight patients with unilateral hemispheric damage (53 aphasics, 26 nonaphasic left, and 49 right brain-damaged patients) and 25 normal controls were given a test of symbolic gesture comprehension and other tests of verbal comprehension and of reproduction of symbolic gestures. On the test of symbolic gesture interpretation aphasic patients performed significantly worse than any other group of brain-damaged patients. Within the aphasic patients the inability to understand the meaning of symbolic gestures was highly related to the number of semantic errors obtained at a verbal comprehension test. On the contrary, only a mild relationship was found between comprehension and reproduction of symbolic gestures. Some implications of these findings are discussed.
Two patients lost the ability to impart affective qualities to their speech following lesions in the right hemisphere. Arguments are given to support the idea that the right or "minor" hemisphere has a dominant role in modulating the affective components of speech. The anatomical organization of the cortical areas subserving affective speech in the right hemisphere seem to be similar to the organization of cortical areas subserving propositional speech in the left or "major" hemisphere.
Visual field differences for the recognition of emotional expression were investigated using a tachistoscopic procedure. Cartoon line drawings of five adult male characters, each with five emotional expressions ranging from extremely positive to extremely negative, were used as stimuli. Single stimuli were presented unilaterally for 85 msec. Subjects (N = 20) were asked to compare this target face to a subsequent centrally presented face and to decide whether the emotional expressions of the two faces, or the character represented by the two faces, were the same or different. Significant left visual field (LVF) superiorities for both character and emotional expression recognition were found. Subsequent analyses demonstrated the independence of these effects. The LVF superiority for emotional judgments was related to the degree of affective expression, but that for character recognition was not. The results of this experiment are consistent with experimental and clinical literature which has indicated a right hemispheric superiority for face recognition and for processing emotional stimuli. The asymmetry for emotion recognition is interpreted as being an expression of the right hemisphere's synthetic and integrative characteristics, its holistic nature, and its use of imagic associations.
Patients with right parietal disease have disturbed comprehension of affective speech. Ability to discriminate affective speech (make same/different discriminations) and ability to repeat emotionally bland sentences with affective tones were tested in three groups of subjects--patients with right parietal dysfunction and neglect, conduction aphasics with left hemispheric lesions, and patients without intracranial disease. Patients with right parietal dysfunction performed significantly poorer than did aphasic controls on both a recognition and discrimination task. Patients with right parietal dysfunction also scored poorer on the evocative task than the nonaphasic controls.
Seventy-two female subjects memorized two photographed faces and subsequently discriminated these "target" faces from two "non-target" faces. The faces were presented unilaterally for 150 msec, and manual reaction times for the discriminations served as the dependent variable. The face stimuli were either "neutral" or "emotional" in facial expression, these attributes having been shown, by a preliminary study, to be highly reliable. Faster reaction times were obtained for left visual field than for right visual presentation. Subjects (N = 36) who memorized emotional faces showed significantly faster discrimination of faces presented in the left than in the right visual field (25·7 msec); subjects (N = 36) who memorized faces lacking emotional expression also showed significant left visual field superiority (11·6 msec), but this left field superiority was significantly smaller than that of subjects memorizing emotional faces. Results are consistent with previous tachistoscopic evidence of right hemisphere superiority in face recognition speed and with diverse non-tachistoscopic evidence of preferential memory storage of affective material. The pattern of latencies for the different visual field-response hand conditions supported a model of lateral specialization in which the specialized hemisphere normally processes both directly-received and interhemispherically- transferred stimuli.
The perception of 60 emotionally toned sentences, divided into meaningful and meaningless utterances, by high- and low-verbal aphasics and right hemisphere-damaged subjects who were not aphasic was investigated. The intended moods were happiness, sadness, and anger. Results indicated (a) significant differences between the aphasic groups in identifying the intended emotion but none between groups in identifying the intended emotion but none between either of these groups and the right hemispheric dysfunction subjects; (b) sentence meaningfulness only affected the responses of high-verbal aphasics; and (c) while the happy mood seemed to be the least frequently selected among the three moods, closer inspection indicated that the subjects in absence of response bias were distinguishing among the three moods with equal success.
The effects of brain damage on cognitive and affective status have been assessed separately; however, a dearth of information exists about the interaction of these facets in the brain-damaged patient. Because appreciation of humour involves both cognitive and affective dimensions, an investigation of response to humorous materials should yield information relevant to this issue. In addition, a study of response to humour in aphasic patients can reveal the extent to which appreciation of humour is dependent upon an intact language system. Accordingly a test of humour, in which an individual chose the "funniest" of four cartoons, was administered to a population of brain-damaged and control patients. Ability to detect the most humorous cartoon was impaired in all brain-damaged patients, more in severe than in mild aphasics, but there was no significant difference between patients with left and right hemisphere lesions in their overall performance on the test. A different order of difficulty across items, and a different profile of "mirth" responses to the items did, however, correlate with site of lesion. Right hemisphere patients tended either to laugh throughout or, more frequently, not at all; they often confabulated answers to made impossible inferences; and they performed better on items with captions. Their cognitive reactions appeared "dissociated" from their affective responses. In contrast left hemisphere patients performed better on the captionless items and behaved in a manner which more closely approximated normal subjects in their humorous reactions, their order of item difficulty, and their explanations. All brain-damaged patients found it relatively easier to locate the humorous cartoons when the members of a set differed appreciably from one another. These results provide information about the altered cognitive and affective states of brain-damaged patients, the impairment of cognitive operations in aphasic patients, and the respective "life-spaces" of left and right hemisphere injured patients.
Evidence is presented that patients with prosopagnosia have right anterior inferior occipital lesions in the region of the occipital temporal junction. Many if not all cases have an additional lesion in the left hemisphere; this is often but apparently not always symmetrical with the right hemisphere lesion. This evidence is discussed in relation to the anatomical connections of these regions and the results of experiments in animals.
Hemispheric asymmetry for perception of non-verbal emotional human voices was investigated in normal subjects by dichotic listening utilizing non-verbal responses. As in former experiments, a slight but significant left ear superiority was found. This finding suggests that mediation of these stimuli is done by the right hemisphere. The dominant role of the right hemisphere in this perceptual task is discussed in terms of an earlier development of this hemisphere.
Comparative recognition accuracies for physiognomic and verbal stimuli were compared when these stimuli were tachistoscopically presented to the left and right visual fields of normal dextral subjects. Results indicated that a majority of the subjects demonstrated a right visual field superiority for the recognition of trigrams, in combination with a left visual field superiority for facial recognition. The introduction of a 10 sec retention interval in the facial recognition task failed to affect recognition performance appreciably, and it was concluded that the initial perception of the stimuli was relatively more important than their subsequent retention for succes on this task. The findings were interpreted within a framework of hemispheric functional asymmetry, and possible topics for future research outlined.
Two dichotic experiments were conducted to investigate the lateralization of intonation contours. In the first experiment, intonation contours that had been filtered from real speech exemplars of four English sentence types yielded a significant left ear advantage when subjects were given a perceptual matching task. This left ear advantage was maintained when subjects had to identify the same stimuli by their English sentence types. In the second experiment, non-filtered versions of four intonation contours superimposed on a nonsense syllable medium, as well as their filtered equivalents, were presented to subjects, again in a matching task. For both sets of stimuli, a left ear advantage was obtained. Thus, neither the requirements of a linguistic response nor the presence of a phonetic medium succeeded in altering the left ear advantages obtained in the perceptual matching tests. Results from the two experiments suggest that the right hemisphere is directly involved in the perception of intonation contours, and that normal language perception involves the active participation of both cerebral hemispheres.
Two groups of left (N = 80) and right (N = 80) brain-damaged patients were given a battery of neuropsychological tests, with the aim of carrying out a detailed analysis of their emotional reactions in front of failures. Behaviors denoting a catastrophic reaction , or indicating an anxious-depressive orientation of mood (anxiety reactions, bursts of tears, vocative utterances, depressed renouncements or sharp refusals to go on with the examination) were found to be statistically more frequent among left brain-damaged patients. On the contrary, symptoms denoting an opposite emotional reaction (anosognosia, minimization, indifference reactions and tendency to joke) and expressions of hate toward the paralyzed limbs were found to be significantly more frequent among patients suffering from a lesion of the minor hemisphere. The depressivecatastrophic reactions of the left brain-damaged patients were found chiefly in subjects with severe aphasia, and appeared generally after repeated failures in verbal communication. They seemed due, as Goldstein argued, to the desperate reaction of the organism, confronted with a task that it cannot face.
Patients with right posterior cerebral injuries did more poorly than patients with other unilateral injuries and normal control subjects in recognizing different faces. When the faces were presented upside-down, however, those with the other unilateral injuries did worse than the right posterior group and the normal controls. This dissociation between upright and inverted presentations was not found with pictures of another common object, houses of similar architecture. The results support the notion that, among the disorders caused by right posterior injuries, there does exist a material-specific deficit in recognizing faces.
Two dichotic experiments are reported which dissociate stimulus and task factors in perceptual lateralization. With only trajectories of fundamental frequency as a distinguishing cue, perception of the voicing of stop consonants gives a right ear advantage. Identification of the emotional tone of a sentence of natural speech gives a left ear advantage. If such parameters as fundamental frequency variation or overall naturalness of the speech material determined the direction of an ear advantage, the reverse pattern of results would have been obtained. Hence the task appears more important than the nature of the stimulus.
While numerous lines of investigation indicate the pivotal role of the right hemisphere in the apprehension and processing of emotional information, the specific contributions of facial recognition, other visual-spatial capacities, and a general understanding of emotionally-toned situations remains to be delineated. To secure information on the contributions of these various factors, matched groups of brain-damaged patients were required in a series of tests to match with one another faces of the same individual, facial expressions, pictorial versions of emotional situations, and linguistic versions of emotional situations. While patients with left-hemisphere damage evinced special difficulty with linguistically-presented stimuli, patients with right hemisphere damage exhibited an across-the-board reduction in emotional sensitivity, one not restricted to stimuli presented in the visual modality. In addition, right hemisphere patients also displayed a selective tendency to group together emotions of an opposite polarity (positively-toned with negatively-toned emotions). These results suggest that, in addition to its general importance in a range of emotional tasks, the right hemisphere is crucial for an appreciation of the structural relations which obtain among various emotions.
Difficulty in the recognition of faces as a symptom in patients with cerebral disease is not a new observation. It was first described by Charcot¹ in 1883 and by Wilbrand² in 1892. Case reports alluding to the phenomenon were later published by Millian,³ Hoff and Pötzl⁴ and Donini.⁵ However, it was Bodamer⁶ who definitively described the deficit in 1947 on the basis of 3 personally observed cases, and who proposed the name "prosopagnosia" for this special type of visual agnosia. Realizing that "prosopagnosia" is often merely one aspect of the clinical picture of severe object or form agnosia, Bodamer took pains to emphasize that this is not always the case and that recognition of faces may be preserved in patients with object agnosia. In this connection, he cited the cases of Lissauer⁷ and Nielsen.⁸ Ajuriaguerra and one of us (H.H.) recently observed
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