The strong right hand preference in humans remains a riddle; no lateralized behavior other than fine finger dexterity relates to it. The relation between handedness and language dominance may be far weaker than currently judged; after all, both right-handers and non-right-handers utilize the left brain for speech. There is, however, a lateralized motor preference in animals, turning behavior, t...

This survey takes into account the unconscious aspects of emotions and the critical role played in them by the right hemisphere, considering different acceptations of the term ‘unconscious’. In a preliminary step, the nature of emotions, their componential and hierarchical organization and the relationships between emotions and hemispheric specialization are shortly discussed, then different as...

The right hemisphere advantage for split-brain patients on a variety of spatial tasks (block design, cube drawing, wire figures, and fragemented stimuli) is found to be highly dependent upon the involvement of manual activities in the perception of spatial relationships or the production of spatial responses. The cerebral localization of the neural substrate of manipulo-spatial functions sugges...

The development of brain imaging techniques, in particular functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), made it possible to non-invasively study the hemispheric lateralization of cognitive brain functions in large cohorts. Comprehensive models of hemispheric lateralization are, however, still missing and should not only account for the hemispheric specialization of individual brain functions, ...

Ubiquitous in the animal kingdom, dominance hierarchies emerge through social competition and underlie the control of resources. Confronting the disruptive influence of socioeconomic inequalities, human populations tend to split into groups who legitimize existing dominance hierarchies and groups who condemn them. Here, we hypothesized that variations in the neural sensitivity to dominance rank...

Two studies examined self-infiltration (as indexed by a tendency toward false self-ascription of assigned tasks) and its relationship to the activation of the two hemispheres of the human brain. Unilateral muscle contractions of each hand were performed by participants to activate the contralateral hemisphere and influence self-infiltration (confusing assigned tasks as self-selected in memory)....

The current efMRI experiment investigated the potential right hemisphere dominance of emotional prosodic processing under implicit task demands. Participants evaluated the relative tonal height (high, medium, low) of intelligible and unintelligible sentences spoken by a trained female speaker of German with three prosodic contours: happy, angry, and neutral. The results confirm the activation o...

Reorganization of eloquent cortex enables rescue of language functions in patients who sustain brain injury. Individuals with left-sided, early-onset focal epilepsy often show atypical (i.e. bilateral or right-sided) language dominance. Surprisingly, many patients fail to show such interhemispheric shift of language despite having major epileptogenic lesions in close proximity to eloquent corte...

Intermanual coordination assessed by alternating finger tapping and finger-tapping asymmetry were investigated in 105 healthy right- and 105 left-handers and related to handedness, familial sinistrality and lateral preferences (in hand-clasping, arm-folding and eyedness). Compared to right-handers, left-handers with less pronounced left-hand preferences (Subgroup B) showed higher values in inte...

Hemispheric specialization for linguistic material was compared for normal and dyslexic subjects under dichotic listening (Experiment 1) and hemi-retinal presentation (Experiment 2) conditions. In both experiments, group data indicated that dyslexic subjects were, overall, less accurate in their performance than normals but that both groups showed similar right ear/visual field superiority. How...