They are usually good at sports when in a one-on-one face-off. In games like baseball, boxing, fencing and tennis, left-handers often have an edge over their right-handed opponents who are used to playing with right-handed players mostly. Left-handers have typing advantages.
Left-handed people are said to be good at complex reasoning, resulting in a high number of lefty Noble Prize winners, writers, artists, musicians, architects and mathematicians. According to research published in the American Journal of Psychology, lefties appear to be better at divergent thinking.
Most of the current research suggests that left-handedness has an epigenetic marker—a combination of genetics, biology and the environment. Because the vast majority of the population is right-handed, many devices are designed for use by right-handed people, making their use by left-handed people more difficult.
The researchers found that individuals on the autism spectrum were 2.49 times more likely to be left-handed than people without autism. Altogether, about 28 percent of individuals on the autism spectrum were left-handed as compared to about 10 percent in the general population.
Babe Ruth. The Babe is probably the most famous left-handed slugger of all-time.
Special or not, lefties are born, not made: Genetics are at least partially responsible for handedness. Up until last year, it was assumed that hand preference comes from asymmetrical genes in the brain—two hands, two brain hemispheres, one is dominant.
Left-handers exhibit a more developed right brain hemisphere, which is specialised for processes such as spatial reasoning. Also, the corpus callosum, the bundle of nerves connecting the two brain hemispheres, are larger in left-handers.
Most children have a preference for using one hand or the other by the age of about 18 months, and are definitely right or left-handed by about the age of three. However, a recent UK study of unborn babies found that handedness might develop in utero.
Overall, individuals with ADHD had a 27.3 percent chance of being either left-handed or mixed-handed compared to 18.1 percent in the general population. So the results suggest that the effects are smaller than for the autism spectrum, but generally go in the same direction.
Wright and Hardie (2012) found that left-handers reported higher levels of state anxiety but there was no difference in trait anxiety. They also demonstrated that when Trait Anxiety was controlled for, left-handers still showed a higher level of state anxiety compared to right-handers.
Left-handedness occurs in about 8% of the human population. It runs in families and an adoption study suggests a genetic rather than an environmental origin; however, monozygotic twins show substantial discordance.
In their analysis of 144 handedness and brain laterality studies—accounting for a total of nearly 1.8 million individuals—University of Oxford psychologists Marietta Papadatou-Pastou, PhD, and Maryanne Martin, PhD, found that males are about 2 percent more likely to be left-handed than females.
Conclusion: Our confidence intervals at a 95% confidence level show that the average IQ for a left handed person is between 117.73 and 127.19 and for a right handed person it is between 109.9 and 123.5.
Left-handedness was associated with differences in brain asymmetry in areas related to working memory, language, hand control and vision. Some of these brain areas were linked to specific genes. Scientists have long been fascinated by left-handedness.
If two parents are right-handed, their offspring has a 10% chance of being left-handed. However, if one or both parents are left-handed, the chance of their child being left-handed becomes higher at 18 to 22% and 27%, respectively.
However, post-hoc exploration of their and other sets of data has shown that there is an apparent tendency for left-handedness to be more prevalent in the period March-July than in the period August-February.
Ethnic differences in handedness are related to geographi- cal differences, with left-handedness generally being more common in White, Asian and Hispanic populations – a differ- ence seen both in the UK, and historically in the United States, where the difference between ethnic groups has grown smaller during the ...
McManus which found that the Netherlands has one of the world's highest prevalences of left-handedness at 13.23 percent. The United States isn't far behind with a rate of 13.1 percent while neighboring Canada has 12.8 percent. Elsewhere, rates of left-handedness are far lower and China is a good example.
As demonstrated with her regal right-handed wave, our current monarch, Queen Elizabeth, is no southpaw — but plenty of her relatives/ancestors are/were. These include her great-grandmother Queen Victoria, her dad King George VI, her mum the Queen Mum, and her grandson, William.
Eleven percent of the population is born left-handed, and if they seem different, it's because they are! Learn six tips for raising a left-handed child.
King George VI and the Queen Mother were both left-handed. Prince William is left-handed, but none of his children are. Infanta Elena and Princess Leonor of Spain are left-handed, as well.