Effects of culture, sex, and age on the distribution of handedness: An evaluation of the sensitivity of three measures of handedness

Characteristics of Handedness in Japanese Adults: Influence of Left-handed Relatives and Forced Conversion

“…The incidence of current LH was significantly lower in females than in males. This trend has been reported in Asian and Western and European countries (Davis & Annett., 1994;Medland et al, 2004). Although there was no gender difference in the incidence of innate LH in this study, more females underwent forced conversion.…”

“…Although it is difficult to determine the influence of a genetic factor from our results, the low incidence of LH in females is considered to be influenced by both environmental and genetic factors. Although it has been reported that enforced use of right hand has let to particularly low incidence of LH in Japanese and Chinese individuals compared with Western countries (Laland et al, 1995;Medland et al, 2004), there is no differences in characteristics of handedness that LH is more found in males, and that "switching" (LH being forced to RH) is more successful in females (Coren and Halpern, 1991;Medland et al, 2004). Thus, these characteristics of gender differences in handedness may be similar between Japan and Western countries, although LH: frequency of left-handedness, LH%: incidence of left-handedness (LH/Nϫ100).…”

“…It has been reported that enforced use of right hand has let to particularly low incidence of LH in Japanese and Chinese individuals compared with Western countries (Laland et al, 1995;Medland et al, 2004), since Japanese culture considers right handedness as the 'right' way of using hands more than Western countries. These differences in cultural and social factors may influence the determination of handedness (Porac and Martin, 2007).…”

Laterality in Persons with Intellectual Disability. I—Do Patients with Trisomy 21 and Williams–Beuren Syndrome Differ from Typically Developing Persons?

“…If very large variations are found between Italy, France and the US, our data may be biased. It is impossible to establish the absolute percentage of left-handers in a given population, but published data suggest that the proportion of left-handers in the USA is about 10%, although this may be a slight underestimate (Gilbert and Wysocki, 1992;Medland et al, 2004;Perelle, 2005, personal communication;Perelle and Ehrman, 1994). The percentage may be lower in Italian communities (about 8%, Viggiano et al, 2001).…”

“…The prevalence of left-handedness differs according to the items used, and classifications of participants are dependent on the laterality index chosen. This was illustrated by Peters (1992) and more recently by Medland et al (2004), and summarized by Fagard (2004). The same difficulty arises when performance tests are used, instead of a preference test (Carlier et al, 1993a(Carlier et al, , 1993b, and the situation is even more complicated by the fact that the structures of manual preference inventories are not the same for right-and left-handers (Peters and Murphy, 1993;Doyen et al, 2001), assuming too that we are able to classify participants in those two categories.…”