ArticlePsychological research2019
Embracing your emotions: affective state impacts lateralisation of human embraces.
Article in Psychological research, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
18 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Four meta-analyses across 164 studies on atypical footedness prevalence and its relation to handedness.Scientific reports · 2020Pooled it
- Politicians pose left but the voter is always right.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Handedness in schizophrenia and affective disorders: a large-scale cross-disorder study.European archives of psychiatry and clinical neuroscience · 2025Article
- A HUG taxonomy of humans with potential in human-robot hugs.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Individual Differences in Hemispheric Emotional Valence by Computerized Test Correlate with Lateralized Differences in Nucleus Accumbens, Hippocampal and Amygdala Volumes.Psychology research and behavior management · 2022Article
- Romantic partner embraces reduce cortisol release after acute stress induction in women but not in men.PloS one · 2022Article
- Dual-Brain Psychology: A novel theory and treatment based on cerebral laterality and psychopathology.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Broadening the scope: Increasing phenotype diversity in laterality research.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2022Article
- Positional biases in social behaviors: Humans vs. saiga antelopes.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2022Article
- Investigating real-life emotions in romantic couples: a mobile EEG study.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Human Lateralization, Maternal Effects and Neurodevelopmental Disorders.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2021Article
- The Role of Ethnic Prejudice in the Modulation of Cradling Lateralization.Journal of nonverbal behavior · 2021Article
- When Push Comes to Shove-The Moral Fiction of Reason-Based Situational Control and the Embodied Nature of Judgment.Frontiers in psychology · 2020Article
- Using Mobile EEG to Investigate Alpha and Beta Asymmetries During Hand and Foot Use.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2020Article
- A Novel Treatment of Opioid Cravings With an Effect Size of .73 for Unilateral Transcranial Photobiomodulation Over Sham.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2020Article
- Complex Sociality of Wild Chimpanzees Can Emerge from Laterality of Manual Gestures.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2019Article
- Article
- Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Humans are highly social animals that show a wide variety of verbal and non-verbal behaviours to communicate social intent. One of the most frequently used non-verbal social behaviours is embracing, commonly used as an expression of love and affection. However, it can also occur in a large variety of social situations entailing negative (fear or sadness) or neutral emotionality (formal greetings). Embracing is also experienced from birth onwards in mother-infant interactions and is thus accompanying human social interaction across the whole lifespan. Despite the importance of embraces for human social interactions, their underlying neurophysiology is unknown. Here, we demonstrated in a well-powered sample of more than 2500 adults that humans show a significant rightward bias during embracing. Additionally, we showed that this general motor preference is strongly modulated by emotional contexts: the induction of positive or negative affect shifted the rightward bias significantly to the left, indicating a stronger involvement of right-hemispheric neural networks during emotional embraces. In a second laboratory study, we were able to replicate both of these findings and furthermore demonstrated that the motor preferences during embracing correlate with handedness. Our studies therefore not only show that embracing is controlled by an interaction of motor and affective networks, they also demonstrate that emotional factors seem to activate right-hemispheric systems in valence-invariant ways.
Indexed as
Identifiers
29349505What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.