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posted by mrpg on Wednesday June 20 2018, @02:00AM   Printer-friendly
from the left++ dept.

[...] Since the 1970s, hundreds of studies have suggested that each hemisphere of the brain is home to a specific type of emotion. Emotions linked to approaching and engaging with the world -- like happiness, pride and anger -- lives in the left side of the brain, while emotions associated with avoidance -- like disgust and fear -- are housed in the right.

But those studies were done almost exclusively on right-handed people. That simple fact has given us a skewed understanding of how emotion works in the brain, according to Daniel Casasanto, associate professor of human development and psychology at Cornell University.

That longstanding model is, in fact, reversed in left-handed people, whose emotions like alertness and determination are housed in the right side of their brains, Casasanto suggests in a new study. Even more radical: The location of a person's neural systems for emotion depends on whether they are left-handed, right-handed or somewhere in between, the research shows.

Geoffrey Brookshire, Daniel Casasanto. Approach motivation in human cerebral cortex. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2018; 373 (1752): 20170141 DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2017.0141


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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by HiThere on Wednesday June 20 2018, @06:01PM

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday June 20 2018, @06:01PM (#695677) Journal

    There's more than one left-brain/right-brain theory. One of them has been disproven. Some of them have been called into question, and a few seem reasonably solid. The "bicameral brain" hypothesis has pretty much been disproven. The ones about some forms of epilepsy tending to start on one side and spread to the other have been pretty solidly established. The processing of language tending to be done on one particular side of the brain is pretty solid.

    Do note, however, that the theories are quite different both in their predictions and in their specificity. And language processing, while certain functions of it tend to happen on one particular side of the brain in any one person, it can happen on either side independent of handedness.

    I don't know the details of the theory they're using. Some functions seem to be connected to handedness to varying degrees (varying by function). But certainly left handed people predominantly have some functions on the opposite side of the brain than right handed persons predominately do. And how tight that connection is depends on the function.

    OTOH, I'm no expert in this area, I just read a lot of stuff. And certainly some functions shift around with practice and experience. If you're a piano player, imagine trying to play a piano with the keys organized backwards. It would take a lot of practice, but it's not intrinsically any more difficult.

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