Emotional perception was examined in stroke patients across 3 communication channels: facial, prosodic, and lexical. Hemispheric specialization for emotion was tested via right-hemisphere (RH) and valence hypotheses, and relationships among channels were determined. Participants were 11 right-brain-damaged (RBD), 10 left-brain-damaged (LBD), and 15 demographically matched normal control (NC) adults. Experimental measures, with analogous psychometric properties, were identification and discrimination tasks, including a range of positive and negative emotions. Nonemotional control tasks were used for each channel. For identification, RBDs were significantly impaired relative to LBDs and NCs across channels and valences, supporting the RH hypothesis. No group differences emerged for discrimination. Findings were not influenced by demographic, clinical, or control variables. Correlations among the channels were more prominent for normal than for brain-damaged groups.

The relationship between event-related potentials (ERPs) and cognitive functioning was studied in patients with Parkinson's Disease (PD) but without dementia. Auditory and visual stimuli were used; 30 subjects participated in the auditory study and 20 in the visual study. Patient groups did not differ with respect to gender, age, education, illness duration, and level of cognitive functioning. Visual stimuli were 2.3 cpd sinusoidal grating patterns randomly presented in an oddball paradigm (oblique vs. vertical spatial orientation). Auditory stimuli were tones presented at 70 dB SPL at a rate of 1.1/second, also using the oddball paradigm (1.5K vs. 1K tones). All patients were given neuropsychological tests to measure verbal fluency, memory, visual spatial perception, and abstract reasoning. P300 and N200 abnormalities correlated with a number of these measures, such that longer ERP latencies were related to lower scores on tests of cognitive functioning. Patterns of results suggest that auditory and visual ERPs correlate with different subsets of neuropsychological functions in nondemented PD patients and that N200 may provide a new metric for clinical use.

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