Schizophrenics have been shown to manifest a significant deficit in identifying facial expressions of emotion. The present study sought to determine whether this deficit lay at the level of decoding facial cues of emotion, or whether it is specific to the process of labelling emotional faces. The latter specific deficit would be consistent with the hypothesis of left-hemisphere dysfunction in schizophrenia. Samples of schizophrenics, patients with affective disorders and normal controls were tested on a battery of facial tasks that had previously been shown to be capable of distinguishing between patients with left- and right-hemisphere lesions. The battery was comprised of four tests: facial discrimination, emotion discrimination, emotion labelling, and a multiple choice emotion task. The performance of affective patients fell midway between that of schizophrenics and normals on all the tasks. Schizophrenics performed significantly below normals on all but the facial discrimination task, and below affective patients on the emotion labelling task. There were no other significant group differences in performance. The performance pattern manifested by schizophrenics across the four tasks is not comparable to that shown by patients with unilateral brain damage. These results indicate that previously reported emotion identification deficits in schizophrenia were not solely a function of the labelling requirements of the tasks. Instead it appears that schizophrenics, although capable of deciphering facial cues of identity, are impaired in the ability to extract salient emotional cues from faces.

Over the past decade, psychopathology researchers have offered several hypotheses linking schizophrenia to specific patterns of hemispheric dysfunction. These hypotheses have, in turn, generated a substantial body of literature on intra-and interhemispheric information processing in schizophrenia. The present article reviews this literature and critically evaluates the relative merits of various hypotheses put forward to account for the findings. There appears to be little support for the notion that schizophrenia is related to interhemispheric transfer deficits or abnormal functional lateralization. The performance deficits manifested by schizophrenics on lateral information processing tasks are also incompatible with models drawn from the literature on left-hemisphere brain damage. Instead, the results suggest left-hemisphere overactivation and consequent temporal abnormalities in processing sensory information directed to the right sensory field.Neuropsychological research has revealed significant functional differences between the two hemispheres of the human brain. The right and left hemispheres appear to differ in their .processing strategies as well as in their capacity for performing linguistic, visuospatial, and affective tasks (Moscovitch, 1979;Tucker, 1981). Stimulated by these findings, psychopathology researchers have offered hypotheses linking specific patterns of hemispheric dysfunction to schizophrenia. Flor-Henry (1976 was among the first to propose that schizophrenia is related to left-hemisphere impairment. His hypothesis was predicated on several lines of evidence: (a) the reported association between left-hemisphere lesions and schizophreniclike symptomatology, (b) the linguistic abnormalities commonly manifested by schizophrenics, and (c) the results of neuropsychological studies suggesting left-hemisphere dysfunction in schizophrenic patients. Gur (1978Gur ( , 1979 subsequently elaborated on

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Recent studies have documented possible ongoing changes to the climatology of tornadoes in the United States. Observed changes include increasing tornado counts in the Southeast and Midwest Regions, decreasing tornado counts in the Great Plains, and increased clustering of tornadoes on fewer days of the year. This study illustrates that the spatial dispersion of tornadoes in the United States is also changing. The dispersion of tornadoes decreased between 1954 and 2017, most notably in spring, summer, and fall. Furthermore, tornadoes tended to be less spatially dispersed in seasons with more tornadoes and with multiple days on which 20 or more tornadoes occur. This suggests that the increased occurrence of tornado outbreaks is contributing to the decrease in dispersion.

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