The effects of anxiety and depression on frontal lobe functioning were tested in two groups of 9-11-year-old boys. Participants were screened for handedness, health, intelligence and classified as anxious-depressed or non-anxious, non-depressed based on scores from the A-State scale of the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory for Children and the Child Depression Inventory. Previous research in our laboratory has indicated that boys high in anxious-depression may have neuropsychological deficits [e.g., Emerson, C. S., Harrison, D. W., & Everhart, D. E. (1999). Investigation of receptive affective prosodic ability in school-aged boys with and without depression. Neuropsychiatry, Neuropsychology and Behavioral Neurology, 12(2), 102-109; Emerson, C. S., Harrison, D. W., Everhart, D. E., & Williamson, J. B. (2001). Grip strength asymmetry in depressed boys. Neuropsychiatry, Neuropsychology, and Behavioral Neurology, 14(2), 130-134]. In order to assess the effects of anxious-depression on cerebral functioning performance on the Trail Making Test (Forms A and B) and on the Concept Formation subtest of the Woodcock Johnson was compared between groups. As predicted, anxious-depressed boys demonstrated deficits in sequencing, alternation, and problem-solving tasks as evidenced by longer completion times and significantly more errors on the tests. These results provide supportive evidence for deficits in frontal lobe functioning.

Emotion and pain are psychological constructs that have received extensive attention in neuropsychological research. However, neuropsychological models of emotional processing have made more progress in describing how brain regions interact to process emotion. Theories of emotional processing can describe inter-hemispheric and intra-hemispheric interactions during emotional processing. Due to similarities between emotion and pain, it is thought that emotional models can be applied to pain. The following review examines the neuropsychology of emotion and pain using a functional cerebral systems approach. Specific comparisons are made between pain and anger. Attention is given to differences in cerebral function and physiology that may contribute to the processing of emotion and pain. Suggestions for future research in emotion and pain are given.

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The current experiment examined the effects of hostility and a pain stressor on affective verbal learning. Participants were classified as high or low hostile and randomly assigned to a cold pressor or a non-cold pressor group. The subsequent effects on acquisition of the Auditory Affective Verbal Learning Test [AAVLT; Snyder, K. A., & Harrison, D. W. (1997). The Affective Verbal Learning Test. Archives of Clinical Neuropsychology, 12(5), 477-482] were measured. As expected, high hostiles learned negative emotional words significantly better than they learned positive words. Additionally, high hostiles were impaired in their acquisition of verbal material relative to low hostile participants. A significant primacy effect for negative emotional words and an overall better recall of negative information was also found. These results support the idea that high hostiles differ from low hostiles in a number of modalities and demonstrate the persistence of negative emotional material. Future work should address the implications these results have on high hostiles in daily interactions.

The thalamus has been described as a "relay station" for sensory information from most sensory modalities projecting to cortical areas. Therefore injury to the thalamus may result in multimodal sensory and motor deficits. In the present study, a 61-year-old woman suffered a right thalamic cerebral vascular accident (CVA; as evidenced by a computerised tomography [CT] scan). Secondary to this incident, she complained of altered sensations across multiple sensory modalities, including olfactory, visual, auditory, tactile, temperature, and pain sensation. Interestingly, during recovery from the thalamic CVA, the patient reported hallucinations in all the modalities cited above. Multimodal dysaethesias (odd sensations) and hallucinations showed reliable laterality in the affective valence across modalities with positive associations within right hemispace and negative associations within left hemispace. Overall, the results support multimodal role of the thalamus and provide evidence for lateralisation of positive and negative affect within the right and left hemispheres respectively.

The current experiment investigated the effects of hostility on affective verbal learning and physiological regulation in high and low hostile women. The Auditory Affective Verbal Learning Test (AAVLT) was administered to women in either a cold pressor or no cold pressor condition. Systolic blood pressure, diastolic blood pressure, and heart rate were recorded before and after the cold pressor or no cold pressor manipulation. Results indicated that high hostile women learned fewer words across conditions. The cold pressor primarily influenced neutral learning in high and low hostile participants. Additionally, primacy and recency effects of the AAVLT were replicated.