Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-mlc7c Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-18T15:16:12.635Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

The Role of Right Hemisphere Dysfunction in Psychiatric Disorders

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

John Cutting*
Affiliation:
The Bethlem Royal Hospital, Monks Orchard Road, Beckenham, Kent BR3 3BX

Extract

In 1861 Broca, a Parisian surgeon, reported a postmortem he had carried out on a man who had lost his ability to speak 20 years previously and who in the intervening period had only regained the use of one phrase: “Tan-tan”. Broca found that this man had an old infarct in his left hemisphere, affecting the posterior portions of the second and third frontal gyri.

Type
Annotation
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1992 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Andreasen, N. C. (1979) Thought, language and communication disorders. Archives of General Psychiatry, 36, 13151330.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Baxter, L. R., Schwartz, J. M., Phelps, M. E., et al (1989) Reduction of prefrontal cortex glucose metabolism common to three types of depression. Archives of General Psychiatry, 46, 243250.Google Scholar
Benton, A. L. (1968) Differential behavioural effects of frontal lobe disease. Neuropsychologic, 6, 5360.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bogousslavsky, J. & Regli, F. (1988) Response-to-next-patient-stimulation: a right hemisphere syndrome. Neurology, 38, 12251227.Google Scholar
Brain, W. R. (1941) Visual disorientation with special reference to lesions of the right cerebral hemisphere. Brain, 64, 244272.Google Scholar
Broca, P. (1861) Remarques sur le siège de la faculté du langage artioué; suivies d'une observation d'aphemie. Bulletin de la Société Anatomique de Paris, 6, 330357.Google Scholar
Brown, R., Colter, N., Corsellis, J. A. N., et al (1986) Postmortem evidence of structural brain changes in schizophrenia. Archives of General Psychiatry, 43, 3642.Google Scholar
Brownell, H. H., Potter, H. H., Michelow, D., et al (1984) Sensitivity to lexical denotation and connotation in brain-damaged patients: a double dissociation? Brain and Language, 22, 253265.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Buchsbaum, M. S., Wu, J. C., DeLisi, L. E., et al (1987) Positron emission tomography studies of basal ganglia and somatosensory cortex neuroleptic drug effects. Biological Psychiatry, 22, 479494.Google Scholar
Coslett, H. B. & Heilman, K. M. (1989) Hemihypokinesia after right hemisphere stroke. Brain arid Cognition, 9, 267278.Google Scholar
Crow, T. J. (1986) The continuum of psychosis and its implication for the structure of the gene. British Journal of Psychiatry, 149, 419429.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Crow, T. J., Ball, J., Bloom, S. R., et al (1989) Schizophrenia as an anomaly of development of cerebral asymmetry: a postmortem study and a proposal concerning the genetic basis of the disease. Archives of General Psychiatry, 46, 11451150.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cutting, J. (1990) The Right Cerebral Hemisphere and Psychiatric Disorders. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Cutting, J. & Murphy, D. (1990) Impaired ability of schizophrenics, relative to manics or depressives, to appreciate social knowledge about their culture. British Journal of Psychiatry, 157, 355358.Google Scholar
Cutting, J. & Murphy, D. (1991) Preference for denotative as opposed to connotative meanings in schizophrenics. Brain and Language, 39, 459468 CrossRefGoogle Scholar
David, A. S. & Cutting, J. (1990) Affect, affective disorder and schizophrenia: a neuropsychological investigation of right hemisphere function. British Journal of Psychiatry, 156, 491495.Google Scholar
Dax, M. (1836) Lésion de la moitié de l'encéphale coincident avec l'oubli des signes de la pensée. In The Roots of Psychology (ed. Diamond, S., 1974), pp. 240242. New York: Basic Books Google Scholar
Diggs, C. C. & Basili, A. G. (1987) Verbal expression of right cerebrovascular accident patients: convergent and divergent language. Brain and Language, 30, 130146.Google Scholar
Feinberg, T. E. & Shapiro, R. M. (1989) Misidentification-reduplication and the right hemisphere. Neuropsychiatry, Neuropsychology and Behavioral Neurology, 2, 3948.Google Scholar
Finset, A. (1988) Depressed mood and reduced emotionality after right-hemisphere brain damage. In Cerebral Hemisphere Function in Depression (ed. Kinsbourne, M.), pp. 4964. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Press.Google Scholar
Flor-Henry, P. (1969) Psychosis and temporal lobe epilepsy: a controlled investigation. Epilepsia, 10, 363395.Google Scholar
Flor-Henry, P., Koles, Z. J., Howarth, B. G., et al (1979) Neurophysiological studies of schizophrenia, mania and depression. In Hemisphere Asymmetries of Function in Psychopathology (eds Gruzelier, J. & Flor-Henry, P.), pp. 189222. Amsterdam: Elsevier.Google Scholar
Foldi, N. C. (1987) Appreciation of pragmatic interpretations of indirect commands: comparison of right and left hemisphere brain-damaged patients. Brain and Language, 31, 88108.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Fontaine, R., Breton, G., Dery, R., et al (1990) Temporal lobe abnormalities in panic disorder: an MRI study. Biological Psychiatry, 27, 304310.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Garber, H. J., Ananth, J. V., Chiu, L. C., et al (1989) Nuclear magnetic resonance study of obsessive–compulsive disorder. American Journal of Psychiatry, 146, 10011005.Google Scholar
Gessler, S., Cutting, J., Frith, C. D., et al (1989) Schizophrenic inability to judge facial emotion: a controlled study. British Journal of Clinical Psychology, 28, 1929.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Griesinger, W. (1845) Mental Pathology and Therapeutics (trans. 1867). London: New Sydenham Society.Google Scholar
Grossman, M. (1981) A bird is a bird is a bird: making reference within and without superordinate categories. Brain and Language, 12, 313331.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gur, R. E., Resnick, S. M., Alavi, A., et al (1987) Regional brain function in schizophrenia. I: A positron emission tomography study. Archives of General Psychiatry, 44, 119125.Google Scholar
Harrington, A. (1985) Nineteenth-century ideas on hemisphere differences and “duality of mind”. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 8, 617634.Google Scholar
Joanette, Y., Goulet, P., Ska, B., et al (1986) Informative content of narrative discourse in right-brain-damaged righthanders. Brain and Language, 29, 81105.Google Scholar
Johnstone, E. C., Crow, T. J., Frith, C. D., et al (1988) The Northwick Park “functional” psychosis study: diagnosis and treatment response. Lancet, 2, 119125.Google Scholar
Kerwin, R. W., Patel, S., Meldrum, B. S., et al (1988) Asymmetrical loss of a glutamate receptor subtype in left hippocampus in post-mortem schizophrenic brain. Lancet, i, 142143.Google Scholar
Lange, J. (1936) Agnosien und Apraxien. In Handbuch der Neurologic, 6 Band (eds Bumke, O. & Foerster, O.), p. 848. Berlin: Springer Google Scholar
Largen, J. W., Smith, R. C., Calderon, M., et al (1984) Abnormalities of brain structure and density in schizophrenia. Biological Psychiatry, 19, 9911013.Google Scholar
Levy-Agresti, J. & Sperry, R. W. (1968) Differential perceptual capacities in major and minor hemispheres. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, 61, 1151.Google Scholar
Ley, R. G. & Bryden, M. P. (1979) Hemisphere differences in processing emotions and faces. Brain and Language, 7, 127138.Google Scholar
Lezak, M. D. (1983) Neuropsychological Assessment (2nd edn). New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Mace, C. J. & Trimble, M. R. (1991) Psychosis following temporal lobe surgery: a report of 6 cases. Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry, 54, 639644.Google Scholar
McFie, J. & Piercy, M. F. (1952) The relation of laterality of lesion to performance on Weigl's sorting test. Journal of Mental Science, 98, 299305.Google Scholar
Morihisa, J. M., Duffy, F. H. & Wyatt, R. J. (1983) Brain electrical activity mapping in schizophrenic patients. Archives of General Psychiatry, 40, 719728.Google Scholar
Murphy, D. & Cutting, J. (1990) Prosodic comprehension and expression in schizophrenia. Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry, 53, 727730.Google Scholar
Parnas, J., Korsgaard, S., Krautwald, O., et al (1982) Chronic psychosis in epilepsy. Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica, 66, 282293.Google Scholar
Payne, R. W. & Friedlander, D. (1962) A short battery of simple tests for measuring overinclusive thinking. Journal of Mental Science, 108, 362367.Google Scholar
Perez, M. M., Trimble, M. R., Murray, N. M. F., et al (1985) Epileptic psychosis: an evaluation of PSE profiles. British Journal of Psychiatry, 146, 155163.Google Scholar
Phillips, W. M., Phillips, A. M. & Shearn, C. R. (1980) Objective assessment of schizophrenic thinking. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 36, 7989.Google Scholar
Pötzl, O. (1928) Die optisch-agnostischen Störungen. Leipzig: Deuticke.Google Scholar
Reitman, F. (1950) Psychotic Art. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.Google Scholar
Reveley, M. A., Reveley, A. M. & Baldy, R. (1987) Left cerebral hemisphere hypodensity in discordant schizophrenic twins. Archives of General Psychiatry, 44, 625631.Google Scholar
Reynolds, G. P. (1983) Increased concentrations and lateral asymmetry of amygdala dopamine in schizophrenia. Nature, 305, 527529.Google Scholar
Roberts, G. W., Done, D. J., Bruton, C., et al (1990) A “mock up” of schizophrenia: temporal lobe epilepsy and schizophrenia-like psychosis. Biological Psychiatry, 28, 127143.Google Scholar
Ross, E. D. (1981) The aprosodias: functional-anatomical organization of the affective components of language in the right hemisphere. Archives of Neurology, 38, 561569.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Scarone, S., Cazzullo, C. L. & Gambini, O. (1987) Asymmetry of lateralized hemispheric functions in schizophrenia. Influence of clinical and epidemiological characteristics on quality extinction test performance. British Journal of Psychiatry, 151, 1517.Google Scholar
Smith, M. L. & Milner, B. (1984) Differential effects of frontal-lobe lesions on cognitive estimation and spatial memory. Neuropsychologic, 22, 697705.Google Scholar
Starkstein, S. E. & Robinson, R. G. (1989) Affective disorders and cerebral vascular disease. British Journal of Psychiatry, 154, 170182.Google Scholar
Stern, D. B. (1977) Handedness and the lateral distribution of conversion reactions. Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases, 164, 122128.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Stevens, J. R. & Livermore, A. (1982) Telemetered EEG in schizophrenia: spectral analysis during abnormal behaviour episodes. Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry, 45, 385395.Google Scholar
Trimble, M. R. (1986) Hysteria, hystero–epilepsy and epilepsy. In What is Epilepsy (eds Trimble, M. R. & Reynolds, E. H.), pp. 192205. Edinburgh: Churchill Livingstone.Google Scholar
van Lancker, D. R. (1987) Comprehension of familiar phrases by left- but not by right-hemisphere damaged patients. Brain and Language, 32, 265277.Google Scholar
Wapner, W., Hamby, S. & Gardner, H. (1981) The role of the right hemisphere in the apprehension of complex linguistic materials. Brain and Language, 14, 1533.Google Scholar
Warrington, E. K., James, M. & Kinsbourne, M. (1966) Drawing disability in relation to laterality of cerebral lesion. Brain, 89, 5382.Google Scholar
Weintraub, S. & Mesulam, M. M. (1987) Right cerebral dominance in spatial attention. Archives of Neurology, 44, 621625.Google Scholar
Winner, E. & Gardner, H. (1977) The comprehension of metaphor in brain-damaged patients. Brain, 100, 717729.Google Scholar
Submit a response

eLetters

No eLetters have been published for this article.