The Effect of Contextual Bias on the Production of Negative Emotion Words in Patients with Right Hemisphere Brain Damage

Previous research has shown that damage to the right cerebral hemisphere (RHD) often manifests as higher-level cognitive-linguistic problems in domains such as emotion processing1,2,3,6,10,14. However, these studies employ metalinguistic tasks that obscure the nature of processing strengths and weaknesses because of the relatively high cognitive processing demand. Individuals with RHD often do not appear to have substantial deficits, and in fact facilitative effects have been observed8,16,17,20, when they are assessed in a manner that reduces this demand, via methods such as priming or contextual bias. The current study investigated the effect of contextual bias on the production of emotions conveyed via video input in individuals with RHD. Prior work reported adults with RHD deficient in producing negative emotion words in narrated descriptions of a video stimulus6. By inducing a negatively-toned bias prior to the video description task, we expected that negative affect words would increase in RHD subjects’ descriptions, as compared to their descriptions when no bias was induced. We also expected non-brain-damaged (NBD) control participants to use more negative affect words than participants with RHD in a No-Bias Condition, with this between-group difference decreasing in the Bias Condition. No differences were expected between conditions on a control measure, the use of motion words

Feature Analysis for Treatment of Communication Disorders in Traumatically Brain-Injured Patients: An Efficacy Study

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Factors influencing paragraph comprehension by subjects with left or right hemisphere involvement

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Influence of Congruent and Incongruent Contexts on Prosodic Mood Recognition by Brain-Damaged Adults

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Clinical Utility of a Semantic Categorization Task

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Reliability and validity of an auditory working memory measure: data from elderly and right-hemisphere damaged adults

The use of non-standardized measures in research and clinical assessments creates difficulties with interpretation and generalization of results obtained. One example of a widely used non-standardized tool is the reading/listening span paradigm for assessment of working memory (WM). WM is an important construct because of its purported relationship to language comprehension and capacity theories of cognition. This paper investigates several facets of reliability and validity for an auditory working memory measure designed for older adults and individuals with right hemisphere brain damage (RHD). Results from 28 non-brain-damaged subjects (NBD) and 11 RHD subjects indicate that the measure is internally consistent and reliable over time. Construct validity evidence, which compares favourably with evidence from existing literature, suggests that for NBD subjects this tool differentiates WR I from simple short term memory. RHD subjects do not demonstrate the same pattern of validity results as the NBD group. Further evaluation with RHD patients is warranted, because clinically this tool may be useful as a measure of severity or a prognostic indicator of language comprehension abilities for this population

Supplemental Aphasia Tests: Frequency of Use and Psychometric Properties

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Communicative Value of Self-Cues in Aphasia

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Contextual Influences on Judgements of Emotionally Ambiguous Stimuli by Brain-Damaged and Normally Aging Adults

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Right Brain Damage and Inference Revision Revisited

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