Recovery progression and symptom resolution in sport-related mild traumatic brain injury.

OBJECTIVE: To characterize the recovery progression of a group of athletes who participated in a concussion management program based on (1) group analysis and (2) individual analysis. SETTING: Concussion management clinic. PARTICIPANTS: Thirty athletes (22 males, 8 females; baseline age = 16.23 ± 2.40 years) who had undergone four assessments: one baseline and three post-injury assessments at 3, 8, 15 days post-injury. DESIGN: Retrospective clinical. MAIN MEASURES: Four neurocognitive scores of the Immediate Post-concussion Assessment and Cognitive Testing (ImPACT) including verbal memory, visual memory, speed of processing and reaction time and also a total symptom score. RESULTS: Group-analysis showed a clear decline in verbal memory (F(3, 87) = 7.36, p < 0.000) and an increase in self-reported symptoms (χ2(3, N = 30) = 48.703, p < 0.000), 3 days post-injury. By day 8, athletes had returned to their baseline levels for verbal memory and were not experiencing symptoms. When athletes' scores were examined individually, at 3 days post-injury, 60% of the athletes showed deficits on two or more of the ImPACT variables. This rate dropped to 23% at 8 days post-injury and remained the same (23%) 15 days post-injury. CONCLUSIONS: In concussion recovery, variability is the rule, rather than the exception, with regard to both impaired neurocognitive functions and recovery duration.

Processing the emotions in words: the complementary contributions of the left and right hemispheres.

A dual-process model is suggested for the processing of words with emotional meaning in the cerebral hemispheres. While the right hemisphere and valence hypotheses have long been used to explain the results of research on emotional stimulus processing, including nonverbal and verbal stimuli, data on emotional word processing are mostly inconsistent with both hypotheses. Three complementary lines of research data from behavioral, electrophysiological, and neuroimaging studies seem to suggest that both hemispheres have access to the meanings of emotional words, although their time course of activation may be different. The left hemisphere activates these words automatically early in processing, whereas the right hemisphere gains access to emotional words slowly when attention is recruited by the meaning of these words in a controlled manner. This processing dichotomy probably corroborates the complementary roles the two hemispheres play in data processing.

Lateralized Affective Word Priming and Gender Effect.

Affective priming research suggests that processing of affective words is a quick and short lived process. Using the divided visual field (DVF) paradigm, investigations of the lateralization of affective word processing have yielded inconsistent results. However, research on semantic processing of words generally suggests that the left hemisphere (LH) is the location where rapid processing occurs. We investigated the processing of affective (emotional) words using a combination of the DVF and affective priming paradigms, and four stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs)-0, 150, 300, and 750 ms. The priming pattern yielded by males (n = 32) showed quick priming (at 0-ms SOA) of affective words in the LH; there was slower right hemisphere (RH) priming of affective words (at 750-ms SOA). In females (n = 28), both hemispheres were associated with quick priming of affective words (at 300-ms SOA in the LH and at 150-ms SOA in the RH). Results demonstrate the capability of both cerebral hemispheres in the processing of words with affective meaning, along with leading role of the left hemisphere in this process. This is similar to the results of semantic research that suggest access to word meanings occurs in both hemispheres, but different mechanisms might be involved. While the LH seems to prime affective words quickly regardless of gender, gender differences are likely in the RH in that affective word processing probably occurs slowly in males but rapidly in females. This gender difference may result from increased sensitivity to the emotional feature of affective words in females.

Emotional words can be embodied or disembodied: the role of superficial vs. deep types of processing.

Emotional words are processed rapidly and automatically in the left hemisphere (LH) and slowly, with the involvement of attention, in the right hemisphere (RH). This review aims to find the reason for this difference and suggests that emotional words can be processed superficially or deeply due to the involvement of the linguistic and imagery systems, respectively. During superficial processing, emotional words likely make connections only with semantically associated words in the LH. This part of the process is automatic and may be sufficient for the purpose of language processing. Deep processing, in contrast, seems to involve conceptual information and imagery of a word's perceptual and emotional properties using autobiographical memory contents. Imagery and the involvement of autobiographical memory likely differentiate between emotional and neutral word processing and explain the salient role of the RH in emotional word processing. It is concluded that the level of emotional word processing in the RH should be deeper than in the LH and, thus, it is conceivable that the slow mode of processing adds certain qualities to the output.

The time course of access to semantic information in high-performing older adults: behavioral evidence for the hemispheric asymmetry reduction in OLDer individuals.

The possibility that the HAROLD phenomenon (i.e., Hemispheric Asymmetry Reduction in OLDer adults) is manifested in the course of access to semantic information, in particular the meaning of emotional words, was investigated using the visual half-field priming paradigm. The time course of priming was tracked in the cerebral hemispheres across three SOAs: 150, 300, and 750 ms. The results showed older and young adults had the same level of accuracy. While priming occurred unilaterally in young participants, the pattern of priming in older participants appeared to be bilateral whenever it was present, that is, at the 300- and 750-ms SOAs. The delay in the appearance of priming in older adults may be due to an increase in sensory thresholds that causes older adults to need more time to encode stimuli and fully activate their semantic network. It is concluded that the bilateral pattern of priming in the presence of an equivalent level of performance in older adults provides behavioral evidence supporting the compensatory role of the HAROLD phenomenon for this particular task.