The neuropsychology of emotion: Evidence from normal, neurological, and psychiatric populations

This chapter discusses the neuropsychology of emotion with respect to hemispheric specialization, factors affecting lateralization, and intra-hemispheric factors. It describes the following sets of experiments are described: facial asymmetry studies of normal subjects and facial emotional expression studies of brain-damaged subjects. Communication of emotion is a multi-determined behavior involving several different modes or channels that interact in complex ways. In studies of the perception of emotion in brain-damaged subjects, subjects typically are required to discriminate between two emotionally toned stimuli or to identify the emotion being expressed in the stimulus. Patients with left- and right-hemisphere cerebrovascular pathology and normal adult controls were videotaped while executing tasks of bucco-facial praxis in emotional and nonemotional conditions. The literature on the neuropsychology of psychiatric disorders, in parallel with the literature on the neuropsychology of normal functioning, is confounded by a number of experimental design issues.