As noted earlier, differences between the two cerebral hemispheres can be seen easily in cases of unilateral brain damage (Lezak 1995). Of interest to the present discussion is the fact that alcoholic individuals have difficulty on tasks that resemble those on which patients with damage to the right hemisphere also encounter problems. In particular, patients with right hemisphere lesions, as well as alcoholics, are disproportionately impaired on non-verbal visuospatial tasks, as assessed by Performance IQ subtests (Oscar-Berman 2000). Right hemisphere patients also show emotional abnormalities such as a diminished reaction to catastrophic events (Heilman 1997; Crucian et al 2000). Additionally, deficits in prosody (emotion speech characteristics) have been found in patients with right hemisphere frontal damage (Ross and Mesulam 1979) and in alcoholics (Monot et al 2001), and deficits in recognition of emotional facial expressions have been linked to right hemisphere damage (Weddell 1994; Mandal et al 1996) and to alcoholism (Kornreich et al 2001a, 2001b).
