The right hemisphere's contribution to emotional word processing in currently depressed, remitted depressed, and never-depressed individuals

Affective Processing in Pediatric Bipolar Disorder and Offspring of Bipolar Parents

“…The lack of a specific bias toward negative information in the BD population is in contrast to studies in remitted and symptomatic adults with BD showing abnormal processing only to negative stimuli (Leppänen and Hietanen 2004;Atchley et al 2007;Joormann and Gotlib 2007;LeMoult et al 2009). However, findings in this research area are mixed, as a study found that remitted adults and children with BD did not differ from HC in terms of their ability to inhibit negative stimuli ( Joormann and Gotlib 2010).…”

Once more with feeling: The effects of emotional prosody on hemispheric specialisation for linguistic processing

“…Right hemisphere linguistic capabilities are known to differ from those of the left in qualitative ways. For example, the right hemisphere is more sensitive to emotional than non-emotional words (Atchley, Stringer, Mathias, Ilardi, & Minatrea, 2007), and is more likely to activate both dominant and subordinate meanings of ambiguous words (Burgess & Simpson, 1988;Koivisto, 1997;Titone, 1998). These different patterns of semantic activation are likely associated with the right hemisphere's important contributions to metaphor processing (Bottini et al, 1994;Mashal, Faust, Hendler, & Jung-Beeman, 2007;Schmidt, DeBuse, & Seger, 2007), humour (Coulson & Williams, 2005) and discourse processing (Beeman, 1998;Brownell, Potter, Bihrle, & Gardner, 1986).…”

Cognitive Representations (Metaphorical Conceptualizations) of PAST, FUTURE, JOY, SADNESS and HAPPINESS in Depressive and Non-depressive Subjects: Cognitive Distortions in Depression at the Level of Notion

“…Considering (a) the lack of research on the notion level of cognitive distortions in people suffering from depression, (b) unresolved discussions on how cognitive changes persist during remission from depression, (c) the similarity between the cognitive functions responsible for metaphorical language processing and those that are disturbed in depressive subjects, (d) the need to investigate aspects as not yet included in research on metaphor (inter-individual differences in processing of metaphorical stimuli, with a special focus on the low mood variable; the metaphor valence dimension), and (e) the success of previous research on metaphor processing by patients suffering from different mental disorders, the following questions are posed:Is depression correlated with changes in the cognitive representation of notions (as indicated by the valence and number of metaphorical conceptualizations)?Do depressive changes in the cognitive representation of notions recede during remission from the disease?Based on:theoretical premises (including the cognitive theory of depression, Beck 1963, 1967, especially the content-specificity hypothesis, Beck 1976; the neuropsychological theory of metaphor, e.g., Schnitzer and Pedreira 2005; the predication model, Kintsch 2000, 2001);the results of research on metaphor processing, suggesting that proper comprehension and production of metaphorical expressions requires an efficient working memory mechanism (e.g., Chiappe and Chiappe 2007; Monetta and Pell 2007);the results of research on the cognitive function of depressive subjects, suggesting working memory impairment and changed attention function during depression (e.g., Fossati et al 1999; von Hecker and Sędek 1999; von Hecker and Meiser 2005);results suggesting that even subjects cured of depression manifest a specific information processing pattern (e.g., Atchley et al 2007; cf. also the overview in Holmes and Pizzagalli 2007; Talarowska et al 2009);…”