From: Patrick Wilken (patrickw@cs.monash.edu.au)
Date: Fri Nov 20 1998 - 19:45:54 MST
>I would say that since women have a dominant right brain, while men are
>dominant left,
How do you come at this? I wasn't aware there was any good evidence
differences in lateralization between men and women that contributed to
cognitive style. While the brain clearly processes different sorts of
information in different hemispheres I don't think there is any evidence
that would allow you to attribute broad cognitive styles to a dominance in
one or other hemisphere. I would be interested if you have any references
that support this view.
As a side note: I have a friend who's Honours thesis in psychology involved
looking at which side of the body infants were held. It turns out that
about 70% of people hold their infants on the left and this occurs
cross-culturally. It even occurs if you give people dolls to hold, but not
other similarly weighted objects like large ball or pillow. In fact
whether you hold a doll on your leftside is predictive of whether you want
to have children. It has nothing to do with handness (lefthanders show the
same bias) and does not appear to be related to putting the infant near the
heart-beat. The best explanation I have come across is that emotional
processing is laterized in the brain and argues that positive emotion is
predominantly (completely?) processed in the right hemisphere (where the
left visual field is processed). So there are weird differences in terms of
laterization, but I am not sure there is any evidence that sex affects
laterization.
best, patrick
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Patrick Wilken http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~patrickw/
Editor: PSYCHE: An International Journal of Research on Consciousness
Secretary: The Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness
http://psyche.cs.monash.edu.au/ http://www.phil.vt.edu/ASSC/
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