Topography of event-related potentials elicited by visual emotional stimuli.

This experiment was intended to explore the effects of the emotional connotation of stimuli on the hemispheric lateralization. Ten right-handed male subjects (Ss) were presented a set of slides of faces expressing a positive emotion, a negative emotion or emotional neutrality. The ERPs elicited by the face stimuli were recorded from 16 leads and topographic maps of P3 amplitude were created. The results show that when Ss had to discriminate between emotional (target) and neutral (non-target) faces, the main differences were seen predominantly over the right centroparietal area. On the contrary, when Ss had to detect a face particularity not related to the emotional content, the differences between target and non-target faces were bilaterally distributed. The present results support the hypothesis that the perception of emotional expressions is processed mainly by the right hemisphere.

[Clinical neuropsychological study of a population of patients with multiple sclerosis]. / Etude neuropsychologique clinique d'une population de patients atteints de sclérose en plaques.

A neuropsychological evaluation of 41 patients with multiple sclerosis was carried out. The investigation included language and memory tests, a visual reproduction task, and one test sensitive to frontal lobe damage. The results show that most of the patients have neuropsychological defects mainly concerning memory. However, only one case of global deterioration was found. The result also suggest that men are more impaired than women, without correlation with age or length of illness. These findings are discussed in the light of the literature.