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. (JINS, 2006, 12, 774–781.)

This study investigated two mechanism-based treatments for expressive aprosodia, a disturbance in emotional prosody thought to be governed by the right hemisphere. The 3 participants all suffered right CVA's resulting in expressive aprosodia. Presence of expressive aprosodia was determined by performance on two batteries of emotional communication. A single subject ABAC design was employed in which two treatments, one imitative and one cognitive linguistic, were assigned in random order. All participants in this study were randomly assigned to begin with the cognitive linguistic treatment. Probes of treated and untreated emotions were completed during baseline and therapy phases. Probe items were judged by a reliable, trained rater blind to time of testing. Visual and statistical analyses were completed. These analyses confirmed that both treatments were active. For example, effect size calculations confirmed modest to substantial treatment effects for both treatments in all 3 patients. Replication to increase confidence about treatment effect and enhance understanding of the neuromechanisms underlying aprosodia is underway. (JINS, 2004, 10, 786–793.)