Illness Narrative Complexity in Right and Left-Hemisphere Lesions

Abstract

Human relations are mainly based upon the exchange of narratives. So, it seems reasonable to study the effects of cerebral injuries upon this essential function of human thinking, and in particualr the differences of the structure of narratives in patients affected by left and right cerebral lesions. In this paper the transcripts of audio-taped illness narratives of six enrolled patients (three with right-hemisphere lesions and three with left ones, matched by age and sex) were analyzed by means of two different methods: Semantic Networks Analysis and Latent Dirichlet Allocation. These methods allowed to calculate several numerical indicators of the complexity of the narratives. Results showed that right hemisphere lesions entail a reduction of the narrative complexity, whereas the opposite occurs in patients with Left Hemisphere Lesion.