(May
2, 2012) The way we use our hands may determine how emotions are organized in
our brains, according to a recent study published in PLoS ONE by psychologists
Geoffrey Brookshire and Daniel Casasanto of The New School for Social Research
in New York.
Motivation,
the drive to approach or withdraw from physical and social stimuli, is a basic
building block of human emotion. For decades, scientists have believed that
approach motivation is computed mainly in the left hemisphere of the brain, and
withdraw motivation in the right hemisphere. Brookshire and Casasanto's study
challenges this idea, showing that a well-established pattern of brain
activity, found across dozens of studies in right-handers, completely reverses
in left-handers.