CSD 470 - Right Hemisphere Disorders

Purpose of the left hemisphere

detail oriented perception, rational thought, details

Purpose of the right hemisphere

intuitive thought, creative thinking, big picture

People with right hemisphere disorder have difficulty with...

- nonlinguistic aspect of language (prosody, body language, facial expressions, emotions)
- math
- process of melody of music

Communication Deficits

facial recognition
comprehending facial expression and expressing
using facial expressions
prosodic deficits
inferencing deficits
discourse deficits

Visuoperceptual Deficits

Simultagnosia
cerebral achromatopsia

Attentional Deficits

neglect
sustained and selective attention deficits

Neuropsychiatric disorders

anosognosia
depression
capras delusion
fregilo delusion
visual hallucinations
paranoid hallucinations

Etiology

stroke, disease, trauma, seizure disorders, infection, toxicity

Prosopagnosia

face blindness; impaired ability to recognize familiar faces, including one's own face. not damage to optic nerve or eyes

Facial expressions, Producing and understanding

inability to process facial expressions which leads to less informed and more literal interpretation of verbal utterances

Prosodic deficits

pitch, stress, rhythm, and rate are all impaired

inferencing deficits

inability to take previous knowledge and apply it to the interpretation of the meaning

discourse deficits (social communication/pragmatics)

insensitive to others, oblivious to social conventions, unaware of personal limitations, difficulty understading humor and nonverbal cues

discourse deficits (cognition)

inability to make appropriate inferences, limited ability to infer the presence of shared knowledge, difficulties with turn-taking and topic knowledge

Simultagnosia

inability to perceive many details at once; difficulty with fitting details together to make a whole, difficulty recognizing objects

cerebral achromatopsia

color blindness

Other manifestations of visualperceptual deficits

- cannot identify things that are incomplete, distorted, or changed from the typical form
- difficulty identifying line drawings of objects when one drawing is on top of another
- failure to recognize familiar objects when the object is broken up or incomplete

Attentional Deficits

(hemispatial neglect) reduction or loss of spatial awareness for the contralesional space

Observed behaviors of those with attentional deficits

failure to respond to people left of the bodies midline, attending only to the right side for self care, failure to move left side of body, bumping into walls on the left side, reading only right side of printed work, etc.

hemibody neglect

deficit in the ability to attend to one side of the body; person neglect

motor neglect

displaying diminished use of neglected limb despite the limb being meteorically intact

Extinction

a mild case of hemispatial neglect in which the affected individual can attend to stimuli within the neglected field of attention, but only with prompting

asomatognosia

individual is unable to recognize or acknowledge a part of their own body as belonging to themselves

somatophrenia

a subtype of asomatognosia, person has the belief that an extremity or side of their own body belongs to someone else

sustained attention

ability to stay alert and to hold one's attention on single stimulus over time

selective attention

ability to focus on one stimulus while ignoring another stimulus

alternating attention

ability to move or alternate one's attention back and forth from one stimulus to another

divided attention

ability to attend to one stimulus while simultaneously attending to another stimulus (multitasking)

Anosognosia

inability to recognize or realize they have a problem, creates excuses or blames others

Depression

common and serious mood disorder; feeling of hopelessness and sadness

Capgras delusion

belief that loved ones are replaced by imposters

Fregoli delusion

belives a familiar person is able to take on the guise of another person and sometimes many people

visual hallucinations

perception of something visually that does not exist or isn't there

paranoid hallucinations

visual, auditory, or both; perceived as threatening, ominous, or foreboding