The Effect of Contextual Bias on the Production of Negative Emotion Words in Patients with Right Hemisphere Brain Damage

Previous research has shown that damage to the right cerebral hemisphere (RHD) often manifests as higher-level cognitive-linguistic problems in domains such as emotion processing1,2,3,6,10,14. However, these studies employ metalinguistic tasks that obscure the nature of processing strengths and weaknesses because of the relatively high cognitive processing demand. Individuals with RHD often do not appear to have substantial deficits, and in fact facilitative effects have been observed8,16,17,20, when they are assessed in a manner that reduces this demand, via methods such as priming or contextual bias. The current study investigated the effect of contextual bias on the production of emotions conveyed via video input in individuals with RHD. Prior work reported adults with RHD deficient in producing negative emotion words in narrated descriptions of a video stimulus6. By inducing a negatively-toned bias prior to the video description task, we expected that negative affect words would increase in RHD subjects’ descriptions, as compared to their descriptions when no bias was induced. We also expected non-brain-damaged (NBD) control participants to use more negative affect words than participants with RHD in a No-Bias Condition, with this between-group difference decreasing in the Bias Condition. No differences were expected between conditions on a control measure, the use of motion words