Processing the emotions in words: The complementary contributions of the left and right hemispheres

Abstract

A dual-process model is suggested for the processing of words with emotional meaning in the cerebral hemispheres. While the right hemisphere and valence hypotheses have long been used to explain the results of research on emotional stimulus processing, including nonverbal and verbal stimuli, data on emotional word processing are mostly inconsistent with both hypotheses. Three complementary lines of research data from behavioral, electrophysiological, and neuroimaging studies seem to suggest that both hemispheres have access to the meanings of emotional words, although their time course of activation may be different. The left hemisphere activates these words automatically early in processing, whereas the right hemisphere gains access to emotional words slowly when attention is recruited by the meaning of these words in a controlled manner. This processing dichotomy probably corroborates the complementary roles the two hemispheres play in data processing.

Caffeine Improves Left Hemisphere Processing of Positive Words

“…Abbassi and colleagues [65] further proposed that emotional information is automatically activated when processed by the left hemisphere. Given that the target stimuli were presented for 150 ms in this study, the observed differences between left and right hemispheric processing seem consistent with the assumption of an early locus of this effect in the word recognition stream.…”

Processamento comunicativo em adultos com AVC unilateral de hemisfério direito : avaliação através de bateria breve.

“…Enquanto o HE está mais envolvido na modulação dos componentes proposicionais da linguagem, o HD está relacionado com a modulação de componentes afetivos (Wymer, Lindman, & Booksh, 2002), principalmente em emoções negativas (Abbassi et al, 2011).…”

Medical Issues through Idiomatic Perspective

“…"Emotional words trigger activation in other areas of the LH, such as the amygdala, orbitofrontal cortex, and posterior cingulate gyrus, as well. These regions have been claimed to be part of the limbic system (see Figure 2), which plays a key role in emotion processing" (Abbassi, Kahlaoui, Wilson, & Joanette, 2011). "The data from a large body of research based on behavioral, electrophysiological, and neuroimaging methodologies appear to converge in indicating that both hemispheres are involved in the processing of words with emotional meaning, albeit in different, and probably complementary, ways."…”