Date of Award

1-1-1987

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Psychology

Abstract

Several studies in the field of laterality have suggested that the left and right cerebral hemispheres of the brain may play different roles in emotional as well as cognitive processing. A study was conducted to test several specific hypotheses derived from theories proposing that the right hemisphere (RH) may have a generally greater involvement in emotional behavior, may be more expansive and less constrained by rational or conventional thinking, and may be particularly involved in such negative emotions as sadness.Twenty-five male and twenty-five female adult volunteers were each presented five Rorschach slides to the left visual hemifield (LVF) and five to the right visual hemifield (RVF) for 125 milliseconds via a tachistoscope. Responses were scored according to the criteria of Exner's Comprehensive System (1974). Of the eight dependent variables measured, only the popular response variable demonstrated a significant main effect due to hemisphere. As predicted, subjects produced more popular responses under the LH condition thereby providing support for theories suggesting greater LH involvement in conventional thinking. For the dependent variable, X+ proportion (a measure of response accuracy), a significant sex by hemisphere interaction was found whereby females demonstrated better accuracy under the RH condition and males under the LH condition. One possible explanation for this interaction is that males may be more lateralized for affective as well as linguistic functions and may integrate affect with cognition less well than females. Therefore, initially engaging only the RH in a perceptual task may reduce a male's perceptual accuracy by allowing a relatively larger affective component to influence the perceptual process. A simpler explanation for this interaction would be that males, being more lateralized for language functions, may have difficulty applying a verbal identifier to a percept entering only the RH and in the interhemispheric transfer to the LH prior to production of a verbal response, the percept may degrade. The results appear to support theories suggesting lateral differences in emotional processing, although these differences tend to be small and there may be interactions with sex and other variables. It is recommended that future investigations in this area utilize larger sample sizes.

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