The leftward cradling bias and hemispheric asymmetry for speech prosody

Most women prefer to cradle an infant to the left side. It has been suggest ed that this bias is due to the specialisation of the right hemisphere for emotion, but investigations of visual asymmetries found no empirical suppor t for this proposal. In a recent article, Sieratzki and Well (1996) suggest ed that more emphasis should be placed on the auditory, rather than the vis ual, modality. Using a dichotic listening procedure we investigated whether ear preference for the perception of emotion in speech was related to the lateral cradling bias. Although the findings of both a leftward lateral cra dling bias and a left ear emotion perception advantage were replicated, we found no association between the two variables-and thus fail to support the recent suggestions of a possible cause for the lateral cradling bias.