LATERALITY OF CRADLING IN RELATION TO PERCEPTION AND EXPRESSION OF FACIAL AFFECT

A dominant leftward cradling bias has been observed in women in non fe eding interaction with infants. Reasons tor this behavior have been so ught in behavioral asymmetries, but none have sufficiently justified t he presence of this leftward pattern. Recently, the cradling bias has been linked to affective processing, considered to be a specialized fu nction of the nondominant (right) hemisphere (Manning & Chamberlain, 1 990). This study investigates Manning and Chamberlain's (1990) suggest ions that a relationship exists between leftward cradling and the inte rpretation and expression of affect. Eighty-six nulliparous women were tested for this relationship by correlating direction of cradling bia s with visual field dominance for perception of facially expressed emo tion and expression of affect. No significant relationship was found t o directly support the hypotheses.