Left-handed and ambidextrous people are more susceptible to negative emotions, including anger. A small study published last year in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease found that the brains of lefties process emotions differently than those of righties, with more communication between the brain's two halves.
It's been known for some time that lefties and the ambidextrous are more prone to negative emotions. The new study shows that they also have a greater imbalance in activity between the left and right brains when they process emotions.
Other studies have found that non-right-handers experience more negative emotions. Both findings could be due to the fact that non-righties are more likely to have unusual brain lateralization, which could affect the way their brains process fear and anger.
In hundreds of studies conducted since the 1970s, research has shown that the left side of the brain manages how we approach the world, responding with emotions such as happiness, enthusiasm and determination. The right side manages associations of avoidance, such as disgust and fear.
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.
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.
THIS STUDY TESTED WHETHER LEFT-HANDED JUVENILES ARE OVERREPRESENTED AMONG VIOLENT JUVENILE OFFENDERS AND FOUND THAT LEFT-HANDED OFFENDERS SCORED LOWER THAN RIGHT-HANDERS ON THE VIOLENCE SCALE.
The same brain differences that contribute to left-handedness also contribute to psychotic disorders. But there's a bright side. Only about 10% of the population is left-handed, yet lefties make up as much as 40% of cases of psychotic disorders.
They have high levels of imagination. Since they use their right hemisphere of the brain more prominently, this makes left-handed people more analytical, creative, and verbal, and showcase better language skills. Left-handed people also have great leadership skills.
Therefore, 70% of your sample left-handed population is introverted, compared to only 45% of your sample right-handed population. Based on this data, you might conclude that left-handed people are more likely to have an introverted personality.
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.
In fact, one of the more unusual hypotheses to explain the rarity of left-handedness is that a genetic mutation in our distant past caused the language centres of the human brain to shift to the left hemisphere, effectively causing right-handedness to dominate, Alasdair Wilkins explains for io9 back in 2011.
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.
While some reasons for the differences in thinking and functioning may be genetic and anatomical, left-handedness is behavioral as well. Things left-handers do differently are often influenced by the societal implications of having a dominant hand that differs from the general public.
Our surveys show that the vast majority of lefthanders DO eat with the fork in their left and knife in their right (what is traditionally called “right-handed”).
A study in The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease suggested that those who are left-handed are more prone to negative emotions. It also found that when processing emotions, lefties have a greater imbalance in activity between the left and right brains.
It is found that, using three different measures, left-handers are significantly more likely to have depressive symptoms that right-handers. For example left-handers are about 5% more likely to have reported having ever experienced symptoms of depression compared to about 27% of the total sample.
Abstract. 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.
More left-handed people are found among schizophrenics than in the general population. Brain researcher Marco Hirnstein believes that this is due to common genes between hand preference and the disease.
In addition to increased alcohol consumption, left-handers report significantly more lifetime experience with illicit drugs, including heroin, ecstasy and hallucinogens, than right-handers (Preti et al., 2012). Such findings suggest that left-handedness is associated with increased risk for harms from substance use.
The perils of being left-handed seem to have no limits. Countless studies show lefties not only are more prone to negative emotions, like anger, but they're also more inhibited. So NewsFeed was far from surprised to learn they're also more affected by fear than righties.