Gianluca Malatesta

University of Chieti-Pescara | UNICH · Department of Psychology

The left-cradling bias is the tendency to cradle an infant on the left side, regardless of the individuals' handedness, culture or ethnicity. Many studies revealed associations between socio-emotional variables and the left-side bias, suggesting that this asymmetry might be considered as a proxy of the emotional attunement between the cradling and...

In this opinion article, the complex issue of the possible role of mother-infant lateralized interaction in the development of brain functional organization is addressed from different perspectives. In particular, its origins and potential effects are comparatively analyzed from both an ontogenetic and a phylogenetic point of view and are explored...

Recent studies have bolstered the important role of the cerebellum in high-level socio-affective functions. In particular, neuroscientific evidence shows that the posterior cerebellum is involved in social cognition and emotion processing, presumably through its involvement in temporal processing and in predicting the outcomes of social sequences....

The left-cradling bias (i.e., the motor asymmetry for cradling infants on the left side) has often been associated to the right-hemispheric social-emotional specialization, and it has often been reported to be stronger in females than in males. In this study we explored the effects of sexual orientation and gender identity on this lateral bias by m...

Many lateral biases exist in human behavior, often implicit and not deliberated. Romantic kissing and embracing received experimental attention in the last three decades. We investigated laterality in paintings depicting these social interactions using two methodologies to assess whether painters depicted such biases and whether these biases could...

(1) Background: It is well-established that older persons compared with younger persons show a bias toward positive valence (a positivity effect), together with less pronounced hemispheric asymmetries, but these topics have been scarcely explored in auditory modality. (2) Methods: We presented auditory stimuli with positive, neutral, or negative em...

Introduction: Since decades, the "Mozart effect" has been studied. However, the diverse effects of Mozart's music components have not been yet defined. Authors aimed to identify a differential response to short-term exposure to Mozart's music, or to its rhythmic signature only, on subjective and objective measures. Methods: The Mozart Sonata in...

Several studies have exploited the face inversion paradigm to unveil the mechanisms underlying the processing of adult faces, showing that emotion recognition relies more on a global/configural processing for sadness and on a piecemeal/featural processing for happiness. This difference might be due to the higher biological salience of negative rath...

Although the population-level preference for the use of the right hand is the clearest example of behavioral lateralization, it represents only the best-known instance of a variety of functional asymmetries observable in humans. What is interesting is that many of such asymmetries emerge during the processing of social stimuli, as often occurs in t...

Molti studi suggeriscono che l’evoluzione ha dotato i vertebrati di un “cervello diviso” in due emisferi per favorire l’esecuzione parallela di diverse funzioni cognitive utili alla sopravvivenza evitando che processi complementari “affollino” lo stesso spazio neurale. È noto che la maggior parte degli esseri umani possiede un pattern “tipico” di d...

Both static and dynamic ambiguous stimuli representing human bodies that perform unimanual or unipedal movements are usually interpreted as right-limbed rather than left-limbed, suggesting that human observers attend to the right side of others more than the left one. Moreover, such a bias is stronger when static human silhouettes are presented in...

In humans, behavioral laterality and hemispheric asymmetries are part of a complex biobehavioral system in which genetic factors have been repeatedly proposed as developmental determinants of both phenomena. However, no model solely based on genetic factors has proven conclusive, pushing towards the inclusion of environmental and epigenetic factors...

Neural populations in the supramarginal gyrus (SMG) of the right hemisphere have been shown to be involved in processing the subjective experience of time, particularly because of their selectivity to specific temporal durations. To directly investigate this relationship, we applied high-frequency transcranial Random Noise Stimulation (hf-tRNS) on...

As shown by a series of previous studies, ambiguous human bodies performing uni-manual or unipedal actions tend to be perceived more frequently as right-handed or right-footed rather than left-handed or left-footed, which indicates a perceptual and attentional bias toward the right side of others' body. However, none of such studies assessed whethe...

Evolution has endowed vertebrates with a divided brain that allows for processing of critical survival behaviours in parallel. Most humans possess a standard functional brain organisation for these ancient sensory-motor behaviours, favouring the right hemisphere for fight-or-flight processes and the left hemisphere for performing structured motor s...

The behavioral preference for the use of one side of the body starts from pre-natal life and prompt humans to develop motor asymmetries. The type of motor task completed influences those functional asymmetries. However, there is no real consensus on the occurrence of handedness during developmental ages. Therefore, we aimed to determine which motor...

Studi recenti hanno mostrato che il grado di lateralizzazione del cradling (che a livello di popolazione mostra un bias per cui la maggior parte delle donne tiene in braccio i neonati sul proprio lato sinistro) può essere considerato un indicatore bio-comportamentale dell’organizzazione cerebrale tipica o atipica nella donna cullante. Fattori psico...

The left-cradling bias (LCB) refers to the (typically female) preference to hold an infant on the left side of one’s own body. Among the three main accounts proposed for such a phenomenon, namely the “handedness”, “heartbeat” and “hemispheric asymmetry” hypotheses, the latter has met with the greatest empirical success. Accordingly, the LCB would f...

A population-level left cradling bias exists whereby 60–90% of mothers hold their infants on the left side. This left biased positioning appears to be mutually beneficial to both the mother and the baby's brain organization for processing of socio-emotional stimuli. Previous research connected cradling asymmetries and Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD...

The vast majority of women (60-90%) hold infants on their left side. Such a population-level lateral bias has been shown to improve the processing of socio-emotional stimuli in both the woman and the baby. Recently, some studies related cradling lateralization and Autism Spectrum Disorders (which entail socio-communicative deficits and a reduction...

Gran parte delle donne, indipendentemente dalla propria manualità, mostra una marcata preferenza per il lato sinistro nel tenere in braccio i neonati. Tale comportamento genere-specifico, indicato come “cradling bias”, è stato descritto non solo nelle madri, ma anche in donne nullipare a cui viene chiesto di cullare un bambolotto. Negli ultimi tren...

Mothers usually cradle their infants to the left of their body midline, an asymmetry that seems to be a typically female lateral preference. This bias is deemed to be an evolutionary facilitator of communication between cradling and cradled individuals and is believed to be strongly related to hemispheric specialization for complex socio-affective...

Whereas the role of observers' sex has already been addressed in research on embodied cognition, so far it has been neglected as regards laterality effects in embodied cognition. Here, we report further analyses of the data used in our paper "Hemispheric asymmetries in the processing of body sides: A study with ambiguous human silhouettes" [1], whe...

Women usually cradle their infants to the left of their body midline. Research showed that the left cradling could be altered by affective symptoms in mothers, so that right cradling might be associated with a reduced ability to become emotionally involved with the infant. In this study, we assessed cradling-side bias (using family photo inspection...

A robust left side cradling bias (LCB) in humans is argued to reflect an evolutionarily old left visual field bias and right hemisphere dominance for processing social stimuli. A left visual field bias for face processing, invoked via the LCB, is known to reflect a human population-level right cerebral hemisphere specialization for processing socia...

Objectives. Cradling behavior, one of the main interactions in which the dyad is engaged during the first moments of infant's life, represents a clear instance of functional asymmetry, 60-90% of infants being held on the left of their mother’s body. As this asymmetrical cradling behavior seems to be related to socio-emotional competencies of both m...

A partire dagli anni Sessanta del secolo scorso, una considerevole quantità di studi ha osservato che gli individui di sesso femminile mostrano una marcata tendenza (circa 60-80% dei casi) nel tenere in braccio i neonati, ma anche le bambole, dalla parte sinistra del proprio corpo. Tale comportamento motorio lateralizzato e genere-specifico, noto i...

When required to indicate the perceived orientation of pictures of human silhouettes with ambiguous front/back orientation and handedness, both right- and left-handed participants perceive the figures more frequently as right-handed than as left-handed, which seems to indicate an attentional bias towards the right arm of human bodies. Given that pa...

In a series of previous studies, we found that when participants were required to imagine another person performing a manual action, they imagined a significantly higher proportion of actions performed with their dominant rather than non-dominant hand, which indicates that shared motor representations between the self and the other are involved als...

Previous studies showed that both right- and left-handed individuals exhibit an attentional bias towards the right arm of human bodies, likely because of the high prevalence - approximately 90% - of right-handedness in humans. Such a bias might imply an increased efficiency in monitoring both communicative and aggressive acts, the right limb being...

The relation between action and perception has attracted great interest in experimental psychology. Whereas old theories assumed that perception precedes action without being affected by it (e.g. Fodor & Pylyshyn, 1981), recent findings on embodied cognition have shown that people's intent and ability to act can influence their perception of spatia...