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Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Advance Access originally published online on June 12, 2007
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 2007 2(3):240-250; doi:10.1093/scan/nsm020
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© 2007 The Author(s)
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/uk/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

The right-hemisphere and valence hypotheses: could they both be right (and sometimes left)?

William D. S. Killgore and Deborah A. Yurgelun-Todd

Cognitive Neuroimaging Laboratory, McLean Hospital/Harvard Medical School Belmont, MA 02478, USA

The two halves of the brain are believed to play different roles in emotional processing, but the specific contribution of each hemisphere continues to be debated. The right-hemisphere hypothesis suggests that the right cerebrum is dominant for processing all emotions regardless of affective valence, whereas the valence specific hypothesis posits that the left hemisphere is specialized for processing positive affect while the right hemisphere is specialized for negative affect. Here, healthy participants viewed two split visual-field facial affect perception tasks during functional magnetic resonance imaging, one presenting chimeric happy faces (i.e. half happy/half neutral) and the other presenting identical sad chimera (i.e. half sad/half neutral), each masked immediately by a neutral face. Results suggest that the posterior right hemisphere is generically activated during non-conscious emotional face perception regardless of affective valence, although greater activation is produced by negative facial cues. The posterior left hemisphere was generally less activated by emotional faces, but also appeared to recruit bilateral anterior brain regions in a valence-specific manner. Findings suggest simultaneous operation of aspects of both hypotheses, suggesting that these two rival theories may not actually be in opposition, but may instead reflect different facets of a complex distributed emotion processing system.

Keywords: FMRI; neuroimaging; faces; emotion; affect

Correspondence should be addressed to William D. S. Killgore, PhD, Cognitive Neuroimaging Laboratory, McLean Hospital, 115 Mill Street, Belmont, MA 02478, USA. E-mail: Killgore{at}mclean.harvard.edu.

Received April 19, 2007. Accepted April 20, 2007.


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