Hemisphericity: A critical review

Beaumont, J. Graham; Young, Andrew W.; McManus, I. C.

doi:10.1080/02643298408252022

Cited by 106 publications

(35 citation statements)

References 87 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…It deteriorated to poppsychological accounts of "left brain types" and "right brain types". As a consequence, the notion of hemisphericity was discredited in the scientific literature (see Beaumont et al, 1984, for a devastating critique). We suggest that this reaction of academic neuropsychologists was unwarranted and may have prevented consideration of individual differences in baseline hemispheric arousal.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Emotion and space: lateralized emotional word detection depends on line bisection bias

2009

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Emotion and space: lateralized emotional word detection depends on line bisection bias Tamagni, C; Mantei, T; Brugger, P There is converging evidence, from various independent areas of neuroscience, for a functional specialization of the left and right cerebral hemispheres for positive and negative emotions, respectively ("valence theory" of emotional processing). One subfield, however, has produced mixed results, i.e. work on the detection of parafoveally presented positively or negatively emotional words by healthy subjects. Right or left visual field advantages were described and interpreted as reflecting the superiority of either the left hemisphere (LH) for linguistic material, or of the right hemisphere (RH) for highly emotional stimuli. Here we show that 48 healthy, right-handed participants' performance on a lateralized lexical decision task depends on their individual inclination to bisect a line to the left or right of the objective center. Only those with a bisection bias to the right showed the LH advantage for word detection known from the neuropsychological literature. Negative emotional words were processed with comparable accuracy in the two visual fields. However, a recognition advantage for negative over positive emotional words was found exclusively for those participants with a leftward line bisection bias. These results suggest that in work on functional hemispheric differences state variables like stimulus lateralization and word emotionality may be less decisive than the trait variable of lateral hemispatial attention. We propose a cautious reconsideration of the concept of "hemisphericity," which once emphasized individual differences in baseline hemispheric arousal, but was later dismissed in a reaction to oversimplifications in popular science accounts. AbstractThere is converging evidence, from various independent areas of neuroscience, for a

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Emotion and space: lateralized emotional word detection depends on line bisection bias

2009

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…During thepast decade, CLEM thus emerged as one of the main indices of hemisphericity (e.g., Bakan, 1969;Breitling & Bonnet, 1985;Cole & Bakan, 1986;Griffiths & Woodman, 1985;Lenhart & Katkin, 1986), although certain writers (e.g., Beaumont , 1983;Beaumont, Young , & McManus, 1984;Ehrlichman & Weinberger, 1978) have criticized such usage. A number of studies, usually using right-handed subjects, claim that CLEM predominates to the right when the content of the questions is verbal and to the left when the content is spatial (e.g.…”

Section: A Harvey Baker Queens College Of the City University Of Newmentioning

confidence: 99%

Visual asymmetry biases assessment of conjugate lateral eye movement

Baker

1989

Bull. Psychon. Soc.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper reports a serendipitous observation. Prior research led to the expectation that equal numbers of right-movers and left-movers would be found in a study aimed at exploring individual differences in conjugate lateral eye movement. Instead, most subjects were found to be right-movers (p < .001). Scrutiny ofthe study's procedures revealed that the subjects had inadvertently been placed next to the left wall of the room. Apparently asymmetrical visual stimulation during the assessment of conjugate lateral eye movement can affect the right versus left directionality of such movement, an interpretation consistent with earlier formulations and findings of the sensorytonic theory of perception. This paper reports a serendipitous observation that seems to indicate that asymmetrical positioning of a subject in a testing room during assessment of conjugate lateral eye movement (CLEM) biases the right versus left directionality of CLEM. To put this issue into appropriate perspective, the CLEM phenomenon is described and some earlier CLEM findings reviewed. Then, after the report of the study, the implications and interpretation of this finding are considered.If two people are facing each other while sharing eye gaze and if the first asks the second a question that requires some reflective thinking, the second person will typically avert his/her eyes to the right or left before beginning to reply . This shift in eye gaze has been called conjugate lateral eye movement.Based on clinicalobservations, Day (1964) was the first to call attention to CLEM . He reported that most people can be described as either "right-movers" (i.e. , a person who shows mostly right CLEMs) or "left-movers. " This description turned out to be somewhat oversimplified: it implies a bimodal distribution of CLEM scores, whereas in fact the distribution is relatively flat (cf. Ehrlichman & Weinberger, 1978, Figure 1). This flat distribution indicates that although many people show predominantly right CLEM and many others show predominantly left CLEM, there are a number who fall in the middle, showing more nearly equal amounts of right and left CLEM . In terms of the issues involved in the present paper, it should be added, however, that if one categorizes a number of people into two groups-those who show more right CLEM versus those who show more left CLEM-the two groups should be approximately equal in size.

show abstract

“…Torrance (1982) defined hemisphericity "as the tendency for a person to rely more on one than the other cerebral hemisphere in processing information" (p. 29). According to Beaumont, Young and McManus (1984), whenever hemisphericity was used in studies it implied that individuals tended to rely on a preferred mode of cognitive processing in which the predominant activity was either in the left or right cerebral hemisphere. For more than half a century, scholars have been investigating the role of styles in human performance (Morgan, 1997).…”

Section: Styles Of Learning and Thinkingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Peeping into the Learning World of Secondary Teacher Trainees: Can their Academic Success be Predicted?

Garg

2011

AJTE

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Hemisphericity: A critical review

Cited by 106 publications

References 87 publications

Emotion and space: lateralized emotional word detection depends on line bisection bias

Emotion and space: lateralized emotional word detection depends on line bisection bias

Visual asymmetry biases assessment of conjugate lateral eye movement

Peeping into the Learning World of Secondary Teacher Trainees: Can their Academic Success be Predicted?

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About