Psychopathological aspects and emotional behavior in right brain-damaged patients

Abstract

We investigated 20 right brain-damaged (RBD) patients and 10 controls with chronic motor deficits for differences in anxiety and depression, measured by psychometric tests, and in aspects of emotional behavior, gauged from videorecordings. We found no group differences in the psychometric scores but, when we correlated these with the behavior scores, we found significant differences in the expression of depression (absent only in RBD patients) and in attitude to illness, ie joking and unconcern (present only in RBD patients). In both groups emotional gesture, facial expression and prosody proved on qualitative analysis to be interrelated, thus demonstrating that emotional behavior has a single cortical-subcortical substrate.