Lateral brain function, emotion, and conceptualization.

Abstract

Reviews research on brain damage, psychiatric disorders, and normal emotion, which has shown the importance of the right hemisphere's holistic and nonverbal conceptualization to emotion. Studies of hemispheric asymmetries in psychiatric patients have suggested the importance of specific and apparently lateralized arousal systems in the brain that support the differential cognitive capacities of the 2 cerebral hemispheres. The operation of these arousal systems seems to vary closely with the individual's affective state. Research on emotional effects of unilateral lesions has suggested that the hemispheres may be specialized not just for the kind of emotion but for its valence, positive or negative. Research issues and methods in this area are still at an early stage of development, yet it seems clear that further research on the lateralization of emotion should reveal how emotional processes are at one level dependent on basic neurophysiological activation processes and at another level intrinsic to the differential forms of conceptualization of the 2 cerebral hemispheres. (3½ p ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved)

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