Heilman, Scholes and Watson (1975)
HEILMAN, K. M., R. Scholes, and R. T. Watson. “Auditory Affective Agnosia: Disturbed Comprehension of Affective Speech.” Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry 38 (1975): 60-72.
Attempts to draw a distinction between propositional and affective speech. Experiments were conducted on 12 right-handed patients with temporoparietal lesions, half of which were left-sided, the other half right-sided. Subjects were presented short tape-recorded sentences, and asked to make judgments regarding the content and the affective mood of the utterances. Both groups performed perfectly in terms of content. However, the right-hemisphere patients performed significantly worse in deciding the emotional content of the utterances. A description follows of relevant literature mostly from the 1960s which examine hemispheric functioning in the processing of affective auditory stimuli. No hypothesis is argued to explain the results of the experiment. They conclude:
Although it appears that lesions in the right hemisphere are important in the production of auditory affective agnosia, the mechanism of affective agnosia remains uncertain. (72)
