Music & Language Studies

ROSS, Elliott D. “Right Hemisphere’s Role in Language, Affective Behavior and Emotion.” Trends in Neurosciences 7/9 (Sep 1984): 342-6.

Summarizes the state of neurological understanding of the right-hemisphere’s role in the modulation of affective prosody and gesture.

The pathophsyiological correlations in patients with aprosodia have, so far, only indicated that the right hemisphere may play a dominant role in the formal decoding and encoding of affective behaviors. Additional evidence suggests that this may reflect a more general specialization of the right hemisphere for all non-verbal and para-linguistic aspects of communication. However, we do not yet know if the right hemisphere is also specialized for modulating the entire range of emotional experience. …Clearly, much work needs to be done in order to understand better the complex neurological organization of emotions, affective behaviors, and related phenomena by the brain. (p. 345)

Because of the strong emotional impact of much music, it seems crucial that any research dealing with brain processing of emotion incorporate research into music processing as well.