[Emotions and hemispheric lateralization. Review of the literature]

Abstract

In the last 10 years a very large number of clinical and experimental investigations have been devoted to the study of the relationships between emotions and cerebral dominance. The aim of the present survey is to summarize the most important results obtained along the following lines of research: --analysis of emotional behavior associated with unilateral brain lesions; --experimental research conducted both in brain-damaged patients and in normal subjects to study the processing of emotional informations and the expression of emotions; --investigations conducted in patients with right and left temporal-lobe epilepsy; --studies conducted on psychiatric patients. Two main interpretations of the relationships between emotions and cerebral dominance are considered: a) the first assumes the existence at the level of the right and left hemisphere of two specific mechanisms underlying opposite (positive vs negative) aspects of mood; b) the second assumes, on the contrary, an overall dominance of the right hemisphere for various kinds of emotions and affects. Data in favour of either interpretation are reported and some implications for psychopathology are shortly discussed.