a disorder that damages the right side of the brain

- Insensitive to others, preoccupied with self
- Oblivious to social conventions
- Unaware of or inattentive to their physical and mental limitations
- Verbose, tangential, and rambling speech
- Insensitive to the meaning of abstract or implied material
- Unable to grasp the overall significance or meaning of complex events
- Some are behaviorally passive

Present pictures of family members, friends, or famous individuals the patient would have knowledge of and ask the patient to name the individuals in the photos

Right hemisphere tests usually assess humor, metaphor, sarcasm, facial expression, and prosody
- Right Hemisphere Language Battery (2nd ed)
- Mini Inventory of Right Brain Injury (2nd ed)
- Communication Activities of Daily Living (2nd ed)
- ArizonaBatteryforCommunication Disorders of Dementia
-Ross Information Processing Assessment (2nd ed)

Expression
- Educate patients on the use of prosody and teach to explicitly
communicate their emotional state to their family
 Read a short story and then be cued to produce the final quote by
a character with appropriate emotional prosody
- Comprehension
- Discriminate changes in pitch or prosody by listening to SLP
produce the same utterance multiple times with varied (or not varied) prosody

- Perception of depth, distance, shapes
- localizing targets in space
- identifying figure-ground relationships

Manifest themselves in the realm of pragmatics
- Areas of deficit that affect communication include:  Facial recognition
- Comprehension of facial expressions
- Production of facial expressions
- Comprehension of prosody
- Production of prosody
- Inferencing
- Discourse

Comprehension
- SLP makes faces or presents photos of faces denoting certain
emotions and asks the patient to name the emotions being conveyed by the faces
Expression
-Asking patient to produce facial expression to match a certain emotion

(Voice) Assesses repetition of affective prosody, identification of affective prosody, and discrimination between two sentences spoken in different prosodic tones.

Assesses ability to understand gestures associated with emotional states.

- Norman Rockwell illustrations help put together appropriate clues and details to reduce inferencing deficits and improve use of inferencing during discourse

- present short stories or pictures and have the patient generate appropriate titles for the stories or pictures
- Expression
 Educate patients on the use of prosody and teach to explicitly
communicate their emotional state to their family
 Read a short story and then be cued to produce the final quote by
a character with appropriate emotional prosody
Comprehension
 Discriminate changes in pitch or prosody by listening to SLP
produce the same utterance multiple times with varied (or not varied) prosody

Prosody, facial expression, body language, emotion

Ability to recognize faces is important in discriminating familiar/non-familiar faces

Comprehension
-Taking a phrase and varying the
meaning of the phrase by altering intonation and then asking the patient for interpretation of emotion being conveyed
Production
- Listening to connected speech of
individual to check for abnormal level
of monotone
-Ask patient to vary prosody to convey different emotional meanings

Assesses prosodic and vocal characteristics of the speaker. Measures vocal quality, pitch, loudness, phrasing, and rate.

- Teach overt rules of social interactions
- Ask the patient to view and analyze the prerecorded
actions among individuals
- Individuals must then apply those social skills to their own interactions to detect and repair problems they may have socially

- Processing melody of music
- assembling small details for the perception of a larger picture

Ability to process visual information of facial features and spatial relationships is a refined skill that can be lost

- Presenting simple inferencing tasks such as
-“It is snowing; the kids are wearing heavy coats. What
season is it?”
-Or a painting

Permits assessment of conversational behaviors that are likely to be affected by right-
hemisphere injury

Visual Screening therapy (VST)
- giving task that requires shift of attention toward/ into neglected space for completion. shift attention far enough left to find the edge of the book
- relies on heavy verbal cueing
- poor generalization to activities of daily living due to cueing

Etiologies that can impact function of the right hemisphere functions are
- stroke
- disease
- trauma
- seizure disorders
- infection
- toxicity

Individuals with prosopagnosia may not recognize others visually by their face, but they may recognize them by voice, smell, clothing, or other distinctive features

Individuals with prosopagnosia are able to recognize other objects, just not faces

Card sorting tasks
- Sustained attention:
e.g., sort cards into suits or color without competing stimuli
Selective attention:
e.g., sort cards into suits or color with radio as competing stimuli

Designed to assess functional language in individuals with aphasia, but may be used to assess communicative effectiveness of adults with right hemisphere brain injury

Sorting task = patient maintain attention long enough to successfully complete the task
trail making task = a paper and pencil tasks where the patient must connect randomly printed stimuli in sequential order