PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

Comprehension of emotional information has traditionally been attributed to right hemispheric processing. Especially nonverbal emotional communication seems to be much better than verbal competence in aphasics. Yet evidence stressing the importance of the left hemisphere for an adequate interpretation of emotional information has been reported. This article reports data on two experiments primarily aimed at emotional inferences in text comprehension. Patients with cortical lesions in their left vs. right hemisphere showed similar deficits in perceiving both verbal and nonverbal emotion tasks. The question arises, which underlying deficits may result in these similar comprehension patterns. Best predictors in regression analyses differed for patients with left hemisphere and right hemisphere lesions.