Cognitive, communicative and emotional deficits after a right hemispheric lesion: looking for the features of the Right Hemisphere Syndrome

Abstract

The group of signs and symptoms observed after a right hemisphere damage can be called Right Hemisphere Syndrome & RHS. This paper aims to present a description of the mentioned neuropsychological pathology. Cognitive deficits, such as disorders of attention and perception (anosognosia, hemineglect and prosopagnosia), memory (visual and spatial amnesia and working memory disorder), praxis (constructional disability) and executive functions (executive dysfunctions) characterize the RHS. When it comes to communicative abilities, the RHS is characterized by discoursive, pragmatic, lexical-semantic and prosodic deficits. Emotional disorders include inaccurate emotions comprehension and production from facial expressions and vocal intonation; besides these deficits, there are neuropsychiatric symptoms. However, a great heterogeneity in RHS manifestation is observed. For a deeper knowledge of RHS, it is necessary to promote more single case and group studies with the right brain damaged population.