By- Sebastian Ocklenburg, Ph.D
Key points
- A new study investigated handedness and emotion lateralization.
- People with moderate handedness showed better task performance.
- People with a reversed asymmetry profile showed more social difficulties and self-diagnosed autism and ADHD.
Does left-handedness affect abilities like creativity or intelligence?
Most people are right-handed, but about 10.6% are left-handed (Papadatou-Pastou and co-workers, 2020). While some older studies suggested that left-handedness may be linked to artistic abilities or intelligence, most recent studies do not show such associations. Handedness, however, is not the only form of left-right asymmetry that people show. One idea that has been suggested is that it is not handedness per se that is linked to cognitive abilities, but how these asymmetries are distributed in the brain. To investigate this, the connection of handedness to cognitive abilities needs to be investigated taking other asymmetries into account.
A new study on handedness and emotion recognition asymmetries
A new study, now published in the scientific journal Scientific Reports focused on exactly this research aim. Scientist Georgina Donati from the Universities of Oxford and London and her research team tested visitors to The Science Museum in London with two tasks (Donati and co-workers, 2024). To test whether the museum visitors were more skilled with their left or right hand, the so-called pegboard task was used. In this task, the museum visitors had to move little colored pegs into holes on a board as fast as possible with each hand. By measuring which hand was faster, it could be determined whether someone was left-handed or right-handed.
In addition, a so-called chimeric faces test was conducted. In this task, the museum visitors had to look at pictures of faces that showed emotion on either the left or right half of the face while the half was emotionally neutral. The volunteers had to rate the expressiveness of the emotions that the faces showed. By comparing how expressive they rated the emotion shown on the right or the left half of the faces it could be determined whether people showed a left- or a right-sided bias for emotion recognition. Moreover, the museum visitor performed a test of language fluency and filled out an autism questionnaire on social difficulties. They also gave information on self-reported autism or ADHD diagnosis.