Hemispheric Asymmetry in the Recognition of Emotional Attitude Conveyed by Facial Expression, Prosody and Propositional Speech

In this study 27 patients with right hemisphere lesions, 25 patients with left hemisphere lesions and 26 normal control subjects were investigated for unimodal and simultaneous multimodal recognition of emotional attitude. All subjects were shown 330 videotaped items of 4 seconds duration, each of which was to be judged in terms of facial expression, emotional prosody and the emotional meaning of the underlying spoken sentence. In a preceding experiment comparable unimodal emotional stimuli were applied. The results suggest (a) right hemisphere superiority for recognition of emotions conveyed by facial and prosodic information, (b) a right hemisphere dominance for the recognition of fear and (c) no significant enhancement of right hemisphere superiority under multimodal presentation of emotional stimuli.