The Left Side of the Body is More Expressive Than the Right

Scientists have long known about different hemispheres of the brain controlling different functions in the body. In the broadest terms, the left side of the brain controls logical thought and linguistics, while the right side controls intuition, visual stimuli, and emotional responses. They have also long known that each hemisphere of the brain controls the opposite side of the body (the left hemisphere controls the right side of the body, and the left side of the body is under the right hemisphere's control). A new study, however, is showing definitively that the side of the body controlled by the right hemisphere of the brain is the one that betrays your true emotions.

The study cites previous studies into what's known as chimeric face stimuli. What this entails is taking a picture of someone, cutting it down the middle, and replacing one half of the face with the mirror image of the other. The results have shown that the left side of the face is much more capable of expressing raw emotion than the right. Since the left side of the face is controlled by the right hemisphere of the brain, then, the results were interpreted to mean that the right hemisphere of the brain is the dominant one where emotions and the need to express them are involved.

These studies' conclusions help explain some interesting previous findings, such as the tendency of emotionally expressive people to expose more left cheek while talking. Australian scientists had previously found that there was also a strong correlation between perceived emotion and gender. Specifically, they found that women were far more likely to be openly emotive in a photograph than their male counterparts.

Complicating the previous studies, however, was the finding that there were sometimes differences between the demonstration of positive and negative emotions, as well as other contradictory studies, pointed toward an ambiguity in the previous conclusions.

However, Claire L. Roether, Lars Omlor, and Martin A. Giese (working out of the Hertie Institute for Clinical Brain Research in Tübingen, Germany) have found a marked difference between the expressiveness of both sides of the body. The left sides of the bodies observed in their study were seen to move with higher amplitude and energy. This led to the left sides of the bodies being perceived to be more emotionally expressive than the right sides. This provides strong support for the notion that the right hemisphere of the brain controls the majority of emotional expressions.

Lateral asymmetry of bodily emotion expression, www.sciencedirect.com

Which cheek to turn? The effect of gender and emotional expressivity on posing behavior, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov