Perceptual asymmetries reflect developmental changes in the neuropsychological mechanisms of emotion recognition

To study how perceptual asymmetries in the recognition of emotion reflect developmental changes in processing affective information, a fused rhyming dichotic word test with positive, negative, and neutral stimuli was administered to adults and children. Results suggested that the hemisphere in which affective information is initially processed affects the strength of perceptual asymmetry and that children's perceptual processing of emotional information is constrained by limited computational resources. Another experiment ruled out effects of volitional shifting of attention to emotional stimuli. These data further confirm that emotional processing involves integration of neural systems across brain regions, including distributed systems that support arousal and recognition. General developmental factors, such as processing capacity, contribute to the coordination of multiple systems responsible for processing emotional information.