Hemispheric specialization for prosodic emotional perception: Temporal lobe epilepsy and the intracarotid amobarbital procedure.
Item
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Title
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Hemispheric specialization for prosodic emotional perception: Temporal lobe epilepsy and the intracarotid amobarbital procedure.
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Identifier
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AAI9732969
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identifier
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9732969
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Creator
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Santschi-Haywood, Cornelia.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Joan C. Borod
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Date
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1997
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Psychology, Physiological | Biology, Neuroscience | Psychology, Psychobiology | Psychology, Clinical
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Abstract
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The importance of cortical and limbic structures in emotional processing has been well documented in the neuropsychological literature. Researchers have focused on performance deficits in patients with unilateral destructive lesions. Functional-anatomic correlates demonstrated that deficits in emotional perception follow damage to posterior brain regions. The purpose of this study was to extend neuropsychological understanding of brain mechanisms involved in emotional perception through analysis of the performance of unilateral temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) patients. Our approach considered neuroanatomical and neuropsychological factors with respect to three divergent hypotheses. This paper describes the performance of pre-operative epilepsy patients on an emotional prosodic perception task during the Intracarotid Amobarbital Procedure (IAP). Subjects were 22 right-focus TLE and 15 left-focus TLE right-handed males and females. Patients with limbic and neocortical foci were included. Location of seizure focus was assessed via scalp-sphenoidal video EEG. For the experimental task subjects identified the discrete emotion portrayed in tape-recordings of emotionally intoned, neutral-content sentences. Subjects received pre-IAP training to insure adequate comprehension of procedures. Standard internal carotid angiography was performed prior to injection of each hemisphere. Testing was conducted at 2 minutes post injection, and lasted for 1-2 minutes. A brief assessment of motor strength and of facial hemiplegia insured sufficient anesthetization during testing. There were no significant subject-group differences for demographic nor IAP procedural variables. Percent accuracy scores were analyzed with respect to laterality and intrahemispheric location of epileptogenic focus. The role of gender was also evaluated. Finally, the effect of variables important in prognosis and treatment of epileptic disorders (i.e., onset age, structural lesion, seizure frequency, generalized seizures) was evaluated. Overall, while impairments in identification of prosodic emotion were often observed, no systematic patterns emerged as a function of injection side or side of seizure focus. Performance effects were observed for gender; females generally performed better than males. In terms of epilepsy variables, the effect of age of seizure onset was often apparent, yet, no systematic findings emerged. Severity variables (e.g., structural lesion, generalized seizures) tended to adversely affect performance. Future research would benefit from increased numbers of baseline and experimental trials, and must consider the importance of etiological and disease variables on cognitive performance within this population.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
