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References

Bateson, P. (1989). Does evolutionary biology contribute to ethics? Brolqp and Phtbwophy. 4,

287-301.

Hinde, R.A. (1987). Indikiuals, relutiottships and culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Oyama, S. (1985). The ontogety of infartnafion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

R.A. Hinde MRC Unit on the Development

and Integrution of Behauiour, C~i~lbr~d~g

G. GAINOTI’I and C. CALTAGIRONE (Eds.), Emotiorrs and the Dual Brain, Experimental Brain Research Series, Number 18 (Springer-Verlag, Berlin,

1989) pp. 264, DM98.

This volume contains contributions to a meeting held in Rome in 1986 in honour of Giuseppe Moruzzi. In a preface, Gainotti recapitulates Moruzzi’s achievements, in particular his pioneering work in the neurophysiology of arousal, and indicates the continuity of concern, spirit and style between that research and the topic of the present volume: lateralised cerebral processes and emotional function. It would be too much to hope for a single story to emerge clearly from any expert discussion of cerebral asymmetries and emo- tion. The topic has generated as many theories as there are observations; and there are very many observations, several of them paradoxical. Instead, the book has all the good qualities of an effective symposium. It is informed, clamorous, intense and enthusiastic. One senses that the contributors’ thoughts flowed well and freely, and the book is edited with style. If, like me, you have not kept up with work in this area, you should find the book a tonic.

Not all the contributors address the title topic directly. Panksepp lights a firework display of conjectures, observations wacky and canny, on the essen- tially social basis of emotional behaviours. This enables him to describe some of his work on the physiological basis of play. Stimulating, certainly. Nor does the chapter by Lanzetti et al. address lateralisation directly, but it indicates some areas of exploration ripe for lateralisation study.

Other contributors provide excellent reviews. Both Doty’s chapter on neu- rophysiolo~cal and anatomical mechanisms and Feyereisen’s on clinical neu- ropsychological studies are beautifully organised and stuffed with up-to-date data from a wide variety of sources. More importantly, both these chapters make real advances in describing what a theory of emotions should look like and how it should relate to brain mechanisms.

Book reuiews 305

The heart of the book is in the section on evidence from unilateral brain lesions. This is largely, though not exclusively (Etcoff has a chapter), the work of Gainotti and his colleagues (Pizzamiglio et al., Caltagirone et al.) This is how it should be, for these recent studies tell a clear story and one which helps resolve some of the paradoxical reports of the last two decades. In these studies on groups of right-brain and left-brain injured patients, different aspects of the production and perception of emotional material were sys- tematically studied. The most reliably right-hemisphere-localised aspect of emotion was concerned with autonomic processes. Thus it is right-brain-le- sioned patients who showed reduced autonomic measures of arousal (skin conductance level, heart-rate changes) when viewing disturbing scenes or (negatively) expressive faces. These, and only these, patients show a tendency to fail to avert gaze when viewing horrific scenes. Other aspects of emotional processing, for example, making judgements on categories or connotations of emotion, or the production of voluntary expressive actions, are not reliably lateralised in these studies. As they are reported here, these findings still leave some lingering doubts concerning the dependence of these lateralised effects on the visual skills of the RH. And they give very little detail of the actual findings (for instance, which hand, if either, showed reduced skin conduc- tance?) Nevertheless, they move us usefully forward. It is appropriate that Gainotti reports them, for it was he and his colleagues who, more than twenty years ago, insisted that the different emotional profiles of focal lesion patients were (a) worth taking seriously and (b) systematically related to side of lesion. His chapter in the present volume lucidly lays out the precise theoretical insights supported and refuted by the latest work.

There follow separate chapters by Tucker, Rizzolatti and Kinsbourne which give idiosyncratic views on the likely relationships between cerebral lateralisa- tion and normal and psychiatric populations - given the findings on unilateral lesioned patients. Common to these chapters, and a welcome leitmotif throughout the book, is an emphasis on integrating left-right hemisphere speculation with the differentiation of actionbased (frontal brain regions, dopaminergic, tonic, activation processes) and perception based (parietal, noradrenalin, phasic, arousal processes). This is first highlighted in Bernardi et al.‘s short and useful chapter which, however, hardly touches on lateralisation. Tucker’s contribution to this “quartering of the brain” seems to me the least successful. It relies almost exclusively on findings from his own lab and the story he tries to tell is not (to me) clear. Kinsbourne is at his most (welcome) baroque in attempting to construct an explanatory edifice which contrasts left and right, back and front, consciousness and action, and the epistemology of emotion. It is dazzling, but on close examination not all the pieces may fit. Rizzolatti, an elegant simplifier, describes his clinical work with colleagues (Ladavas, Sava) and interprets the findings in a cool light. Unimanual simple reaction times to lateralised probes are slowed when a concurrent task has to

306 Book rec’,ews

be performed by the hemisphere specialised for that task. The right hemi- sphere is specifically slowed in such simple reaction times when it is (nega- tively emotionally implicated. Right hemisphere hypoactivation, indicated by slowed RH simple reaction times, can indicate depression.

The focus on cerebral lateralisation may set this book apart from a number of recent volumes on the biology and psychology of emotion. Its value became clear when I read in Doty’s chapter of recent reports (Reiman et al., Buchs- baum et al.) of PET-scans on the brains of people suffering panic attacks. These show right hemisphere activation. Of course, such pictures of the brain-in-action are illuminating. But if we had no functional accounts of cerebral processes (including subcortical ones), based on lesion studies and on neurophysiological research, we would still not be able to understand effec- tively the interplay of the two hemispheres in the control of emotional behaviour. Using “ traditional” neuropsychological and neurophysiological means, Gainotti and Caltagirone’s book helps deepen our understanding of the processes by which our lives are endowed with meaning and with feeling.

Ruth Campbell Department of Psycholoa,

Goldsmiths College, University of London