Judging emotion and attitudes from prosody following brain damage

Research has long indicated a role for the right hemisphere in the decoding of basic emotions from speech prosody, although there are few data on how the right hemisphere is implicated in processes for understanding the emotive "attitudes" of a speaker from prosody. We describe recent clinical studies that compared how well listeners with and without focal right hemisphere damage (RHD) understand speaker attitudes such as "confidence" or "politeness," which are signaled in large part by prosodic features of an utterance. We found that RHD listeners as a group were abnormally sensitive to both the expressed confidence and expressed politeness of speakers, and that these difficulties often correlated with impairments for understanding basic emotions from prosody in many RHD individuals. Our data emphasize a central role for the right hemisphere in the ability to appreciate emotions and speaker attitudes from prosody, although the precise source of these social-pragmatic deficits may arise in different ways in the context of right hemisphere compromise.