According to the latest study of Geoffrey Brookshire, who is a Ph.D. student at the New School Research, being a lefty or a righty controls the way our brain organizes emotions such as motivation; motivation, the main building block of emotion, is defined as the reason of an individual to behave in a certain way. The study disproved many former theories which claimed that approach motivation takes place in the brain’s left hemisphere whereas avoidance motivation takes place in the right.

  This study which used electroencephalography, or EEG, during the process in order to compare activities in the right hemisphere with the left while in the stage of rest, discovered that stronger approach motivation was linked with more activity in the left hemisphere than in the right for right-handers. On the contrary, approach motivation was linked with more activity in the right hemisphere than the left. For righties, their approach motivation was present in the hemisphere which controlled the right while the avoidance motivation was present in the hemisphere controlling the left hand. The right hemisphere controls approach in left-handers which is the same hemisphere which controlled the left hand. Therefore, generally speaking, approach actions occur with the dominant hand whereas avoidance actions occur with the non-dominant hands.

   Brookshire’s study has also been linked with an old sword-and-shield method from centuries ago where the individual would approach the enemy with the sword in his/her dominant hand and the shield for protection in his/her non-dominant hand. A present day example of this sword-and-shield method is picking an apple from a tree where the action of pulling an apple occurs with the dominant hand while the action of pushing back the branch occurs by the non-dominant hand. Cognitive functions, however, do not reverse depending on handedness. These functions refer to any process taking place in the brain such as speaking, listening, and thinking. For instance, language is processed in the left hemisphere in most left and right handers.

 There is hope, from this discovery, that there will be a rise in safer and more effective neural therapies for lefties. For more information about Brookshire’s study, check out: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/malleable-mind/201205/emotion-is-reversed-in-left-handers-brains