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or the ability to judge similarity between two emotional
words (Etcoff, 1984).
However, recent evidence contradicts these findings.
Borod et al. (1992) found that, when compared to LHD and NHD
patients, RHD patients were more impaired in identifying and
discriminating emotional words and sentences. In addition,
RHD patients were impaired in their understanding of
emotionality in complex narratives (Gardner, Brownell,
Wapner, & Michelon, 1983; Gardner, Ling, Flam, & Silverman,
1975; Brownell, Michelon, Powelson, & Gardner, 1983). The
deficits of RHD patients in understanding complex narratives
may not be related to emotion, but to difficulties of RHD
patients in drawing inferences, reasoning, and interpreting
figures of speech (Heilman, Bowers, & Valenstein, in press).
However, this explanation does not explain the results of
Borod et al. (1992) who found that RHD were impaired in
identifying and discriminating words and short sentences.
Taken together, the above studies indicate that
patients with RHD have more difficulty than LHD patients and
NHD controls in evaluating nonverbal signals of emotion,
including facial expressions, emotional prosody, and verbal
messages of emotions. Moreover, RHD patients are equally
impaired for both positive and negative emotional signals.
Although some deficits in recognition of facial expressions
in RHD patients are related to general dysfunction in
visuospatial ability, others are apparently independent of