Emotional perception in unilateral stroke patients: Recovery, test stability, and interchannel relationships

Despite an ever-increasing literature on language and cognitive recovery after brain injury, there are relatively few investigations about the recovery of emotional processing. The main purpose of this study was to provide a preliminary evaluation of recovery of emotional perception across 3 communication channels in unilateral stroke patients. In addition, instrument stability and interrelationships among the channels were examined. Tasks assessing facial, prosodic, and lexical emotional identification from the New York Emotion Battery (Borod, Welkowitz, & Obler, 1992) were administered to right-brain-damaged (RBD), left-brain-damaged (LBD), and normal control (NC) participants. Emotional, as well as nonemotional control, tasks were examined at 2 times, with a median interval of 25 months. Findings revealed some evidence of recovery on emotional perception tasks. Participant group differences were found at baseline on lexical and prosodic emotion tasks. Test-retest correlations were high for NCs and LBDs but low for RBDs. Significant relationships were more frequent for the facial versus prosodic channel than for the lexical versus the 2 nonverbal channels, suggesting that facial and prosodic perception may subserve a general emotional processor.