Faculty Bibliography

This study was designed to address the issue of whether there is a general processor for the perception of emotion or whether there are separate processors. We examined the relationships among three channels of emotional communication in 100 healthy right-handed adult males and females. The channels were facial, prosodic/intonational, and lexical/verbal; both identification and discrimination tasks of emotional perception were utilised. Statistical analyses controlled for nonemotional perceptual factors and subject characteristics (i.e. demographic and general cognitive). For identification, multiple significant correlations were found among the channels. For discrimination, fewer correlations were significant. Overall, these results provide support for the notion of a general processor for emotional perceptual identification in normal adult subjects

Subject selection criteria and descriptive data were compiled from 15 consecutive aphasia group studies published in Brain and Language from its inception (1974-1976) and two decades later. While some measures remain constant (aphasia type and lesion site are most commonly used in both periods), additional measures are reported only or more frequently in the recent period (e.g., age, handedness, bilingualism, language spoken, multiple vs. single lesions). Of interest is the decrease in the total number of subjects included in aphasia group studies from the early to the current period.