Affiliations: Physiological Psychology, University of Bielefeld,
D-33501 Bielefeld, Germany.
Note: [] Corresponding author: Hans J. Markowitsch, Physiological
Psychology, University of Bielefeld, P.O. Box 10 01 31, D-33501 Bielefeld,
Germany. Tel.: +49 521 106 4487; Fax: +49 521 106 6049; E-mail:
hjmarkowitsch@uni-bielefeld.de.
Abstract: Evidence for a differential involvement of the human left and right
amygdala in emotional and cognitive behaviour is reviewed, with a particular
emphasis on functional imaging results and case reports on patients with
amygdalar damage. The available evidence allows one to conclude that there is
definitely a hemisphere specific processing difference between the left and
right amygdala. However, between studies the direction of the asymmetry is
partly incongruent. In spite of this, the following tentative proposals are
made: the left amygdala is more closely related to affective information
encoding with a higher affinity to language and to detailed feature extraction,
and the right amygdala to affective information retrieval with a higher
affinity to pictorial or image-related material. Furthermore, the right
amygdala may be more strongly engaged than the left one in a fast, shallow or
gross analysis of affect-related information.
