Right Hemisphere Disorder

EDSP 162

Normal RH functions

Nonlinguistic: ability to attend

• prosody

• facial expression

• body language

• emotion

Visuospatial:

• Perception of depth, distance, shapes

• Localizing targets in space

• Identifying figure-ground relationships

What is a right hemisphere disorder?

A group of deficits or changes that may occur following insult to a person’s right cerebral hemisphere

Why don’t we see language impairments with RHD?

Language is typically left hemisphere dominant

Etiology of RHD

• Stroke - most common

• Disease

• Trauma

• Seizure disorders

• Infection

• Toxicity

Hallmark characteristics of a RHD

• Attention impairment

• Hemispatial neglect

• Displaying and conveying emotion

• executive impairment

  • these all depend on the area of injury

RHD

Plays a role with attention operations due to the arousal system being lateralized to the right hemisphere

• Reduced arousal

• Orienting attention

• Vigilance

• RH more active when selective attention and vigilance are required

Neglect

Am impairment of attention

• typically seen in the parietal lobe

• can be left or right hemisphere damage

• Shifts attention without realization

Aprosodia/dysprosody

• Used to describe comprehension and expressive problems

• Flat and monotone speech

• Difficulty with prosodic comprehension and expression of linguistics and emotional behavior

Affective disorder

Comprehension and production of facial expressions

Language and RHD

• Do not repeat with aphasia

• Conversation level is difficult

• Difficulty understanding the intended meaning

• Difficulty with perspective-taking

• May be in denial of their defecits

Agnosia

Without knowing

Prosopagnosia

The inability to recognize faces

Anosognosia

Unawareness of impairment

• most common

Formal testing for RHD

• Good for looking at areas of language the aphasias don’t

• Tests usually look at humor, metaphors, sarcasm, facial expression, and prosody