Harciarek Michal, Heilman Kenneth M, Jodzio Krzysztof
Institute of Psychology, University of Gdansk, Gdansk, Poland.
J Int Neuropsychol Soc. 2006 Nov;12(6):774-81. doi: 10.1017/S1355617706061121.
Studies of patients with brain damage, as well as studies with normal subjects have revealed that the right hemisphere is important for recognizing emotions expressed by faces and prosody. It is unclear, however, if the knowledge needed to perform recognition of emotional stimuli is organized by modality or by the type of emotion. Thus, the purpose of this study is to assess these alternative a priori hypotheses. The participants of this study were 30 stroke patients with right hemisphere damage (RHD) and 31 normal controls (NC). Subjects were assessed with the Polish adaptation of the Right Hemisphere Language Battery of Bryan and the Facial Affect Recognition Test based on work of Ekman and Friesen. RHD participants were significantly impaired on both emotional tasks. Whereas on the visual-faces task the RHD subjects recognized happiness better than anger or sadness, the reverse dissociation was found in the auditory-prosody test. These results confirm prior studies demonstrating the role of the right hemisphere in understanding facial and prosodic emotional expressions. These results also suggest that the representations needed to recognize these emotional stimuli are organized by modality (prosodic-echoic and facial-eidetic) and that some modality specific features are more impaired than others.
对脑损伤患者以及正常受试者的研究表明，右半球对于识别面部表情和韵律所表达的情绪很重要。然而，执行情绪刺激识别所需的知识是按模态还是按情绪类型组织尚不清楚。因此，本研究的目的是评估这些先验假设。本研究的参与者为30名右半球损伤（RHD）的中风患者和31名正常对照（NC）。受试者接受了基于Bryan的右半球语言量表波兰语改编版以及基于Ekman和Friesen工作的面部表情识别测试。RHD参与者在两项情绪任务上均有显著损伤。在视觉面部任务中，RHD受试者识别快乐表情比识别愤怒或悲伤表情更好，而在听觉韵律测试中则发现了相反的分离现象。这些结果证实了先前的研究，证明了右半球在理解面部和韵律情绪表达中的作用。这些结果还表明，识别这些情绪刺激所需的表征是按模态（韵律回声和面部表象）组织的，并且一些模态特定特征比其他特征受损更严重。
