Patients with right hemisphere lesions (RHD) often demonstrate flattened affect, decreased arousal, and a variety of emotional communicaitons disorders. A previous study suggests that RHD patients also recall emotional versus non-emotional stories less well than normal or left hemisphere damaged (LHD) patients. The present proposal attempts to elucidate some of the neuropsychological characteristics of this memory disturbance and its anatomic correlation. Three studies are proposed in which RHD, LHD, and non-brain-damaged patients are examined on a variety of different emotional memory tasks. Experiment I assesses the ability of RHD patients to spontaneously acquire emotional and non-emotional words using a work list learning paradigm. Experiment 2 uses a """"""""levels of processing"""""""" paradigm to determine whether directed attention to emotional and semantic messages at the time of """"""""encoding"""""""" differentially facilitates memory performance. Experiment 3 assesses the ability of RHD patients to recall emotional experiences from remote memory. Throughout these studies, we plan to measure psychophysiological responses and to correlate these measures with memory performance and locus of injury.
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