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.