Negative Word Production in Adults With Right Hemisphere Brain Damage: Effects of Implicit Assessment and Contextual Bias

Purpose: Both theory and evidence suggest that unilateral right hemisphere brain damage (RHD) should impair the processing of negative emotions. Typical metalinguistic assessments, however, may obscure processing strengths. This study investigated whether adults with RHD would produce proportionately fewer negative emotion words than control participants in an implicit assessment task and whether a negatively toned contextual bias would enhance performance. Methods: Eleven participants with RHD and 10 control participants without brain damage watched a video in 2 parts and described each segment. Between segments, participants evaluated the emotion conveyed by sentences designed to induce the negative bias. Results: The primary outcome measure, percentage of negative emotion words in video descriptions, did not differ between groups. After the contextual bias, this measure significantly increased for both groups, whereas production of motion words, a control variable, remained constant. Conclusions: Findings are consistent with a view that attributes some deficient RHD performances to the nature and/or demands of explicit metalinguistic assessment tasks. These results call for modulation of prevailing hypotheses that attribute negative emotion processing as an undifferentiated whole solely to the right cerebral hemisphere. The results also further substantiate the rationale of an experimental treatment that exploits contextual bias and priming for individuals with RHD.