[Emotional impact of facial palsy]. / Emotionale Auswirkungen einer Fazialisparese.

Facial palsy is not only a movement disorder but leads also to an emotional and communicative disorder in chronic stage but also in some patients already during the acute phase of the disease. The present review describes the current knowledge of the neurobiological and psychological fundamentals on the relation of facial movement and its emotional context. So far there is not much knowledge on the impact of a facial palsy on the interaction between facial movement, emotional processing and communicative skills of the patient. The emotional contagion seems to be reduced in patients with facial palsy. The ability to express emotions seems also to be reduced. Moreover, the patients feel to be perceived negatively. In fact, most of the expressions of patients with facial palsy are allocated with a negative affect even when the patients are smiling. Patients with facial palsy react with negative stress, anxiety and depression. The patients avoid social contacts. In turn, this reinforces the communicative disorder. The otorhinolaryngologist can use the Facial Disability Index as a simple questionnaire to detect such dysfunctions. Diagnostics that are necessary to develop a therapy program are presented in this review. Standardized therapy concepts that are not only treat the movement disorder but also the emotional context is missing so far. Finally, the review will give an outlook on potential therapy strategies.

Syntactic and semantic processing in the healthy and aphasic human brain.

A syntactic and a semantic task were performed by German-speaking healthy subjects and aphasics with lesions in the dominant left hemisphere. In both tasks, pictures of objects were presented that had to be classified by pressing buttons. The classification was into grammatical gender in the syntactic task (masculine or feminine gender?) and into semantic category in the semantic task (man- or nature made?). Behavioral data revealed a significant Group by Task interaction, with aphasics showing most pronounced problems with syntax. Brain event-related potentials 300-600 ms following picture onset showed different task-dependent laterality patterns in the two groups. In controls, the syntax task induced a left-lateralized negative ERP, whereas the semantic task produced more symmetric responses over the hemispheres. The opposite was the case in the patients, where, paradoxically, stronger laterality of physiological brain responses emerged in the semantic task than in the syntactic task. We interpret these data based on neuro-psycholinguistic models of word processing and current theories about the roles of the hemispheres in language recovery.

Event-related potential correlates of verbal and pictorial feature comparison in aphasics and controls.

Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded from 19 aphasic patients and 18 controls in four versions of a feature comparison task, in which the verbal or pictorial representation of a first stimulus (S1) had to be compared with the verbal or pictorial representation of a second stimulus (S2) presented 2 s later. These tasks were designed to cover some of the discriminatory variance of the token test (TT) including the analytical isolation, encoding and short-term storage of individual features of objects, independent of auditory verbal comprehension. Aphasics made more errors and had longer response latencies than controls in all four tasks, performance being poorest when verbal stimuli had to be processed. ERP analyses - restricted to subjects performing well above chance and to trials with correct responses - were confined to the slow wave (SW) (250-750 ms post-S1-onset) and the contingent negative variation (CNV) preceding the S2. There was no overall group difference that would have suggested that the patients activated different cortical areas than controls on correct performance. A left-hemispheric predominance of the negative SW was found in all four tasks and in both groups, although it was more pronounced in aphasics, and more pronounced in non-fluent than in fluent aphasics. The CNV was characterized by a left-hemispheric accentuation which was more pronounced in controls than in aphasics, particularly in tasks with a verbal S2. Results indicate that successful feature comparisons in the present tasks activate primarily left-anterior cortical areas. During encoding and short-term storage this activation is more pronounced in aphasics than in controls.

EEG brain mapping of phonological and semantic tasks in Italian and German languages.

OBJECTIVES: Event-related potential correlates of phonological encoding - as compared with lexical access and semantic categorization - were measured in two studies involving two groups of 14 German and 14 Italian subjects. METHODS: A two stimulus reaction time paradigm was used. Stimulus pairs presented one-by-one with 2 s inter-stimulus intervals (ISI) had to be matched with respect to lexical identity (word-picture) in a word comprehension task or with respect to the phonological representative of objects in a rhyming task. A semantic categorization task was added for the Italian sample. In both studies, the EEG was recorded from 26 scalp electrodes according to the 10-20 system. The slow negative potential during the ISI (CNV) was determined as the electrocortical correlate of preparation for and activation of the specific language-related task. RESULTS: In both samples, phonological encoding (rhyming) evoked a more pronounced CNV over the left- compared with the right-frontal area, while less lateralized central dominance of the CNV was found in the word comprehension task. Semantic categorization was accompanied by the least asymmetry of activity. CONCLUSIONS: Results indicate that the different degree of asymmetry induced by phonological and semantic processing may be determined from the scalp distribution of slow cortical potentials with cross-lingual reliability.

Monitoring brain activity of human subjects during delayed matching to sample tasks comparing verbal and pictorial stimuli with modal and cross-modal presentation: an event related potential study employing a source reconstruction method.

The time course of the event related potentials evoked within a delayed matching to sample task employing verbal and pictorial stimuli was analyzed with a source reconstruction method (minimum norm method). During signal stimulus presentation pictorial stimuli evoked more activity than verbal stimuli. Activity was particularly prominent in left frontal areas for the match of verbal-verbal stimulus pairs and over right posterior regions for the match of verbal-pictorial stimuli. Anticipation of the to-be-matched stimulus produced more pronounced activity for pictorial stimuli and generally stronger left and frontal activity. Results are discussed referring to a biological model of language processing.