Baskın el kullanımı ve duygusal değer yargıları arasındaki ilişki: Jest kavrama çalışması

According to the body specificity theory, the differences between people's bodies affect their mental representations of the world (Casasanto, 2009). People with different hand preferences assign positive and negative emotions to different sides of their bodies and they produce co-speech gestures with their dominant hand when the content is positive and non-dominant hand when the content is negative (Casasanto & Jasmin, 2010). Our study investigated if this side preference by handedness was also valid for gesture comprehension using eye gaze information. Participants watched faceless gesture videos with negative and positive content on eye-tracker. Our results indicated no difference in looking preferences with regard to being right- or left-handed. Yet, an effect of emotional valence was observed. Participants spent more time looking to the right (actor's left) when the information was positive and to the left (actor's right) when the information was negative. Additionally, a directionality effect from left to right was observed for the first three seconds of the videos regardless of handedness or valence. Finally, our gesture production task, which included participants re-telling of the negative and positive content while their spontaneous gestures were being videotaped revealed a handedness effect only for different types of gestures (representational vs. beat). Participants preferred to use their dominant hand more for beat gestures, however, for representational gestures while the right-handers used their right hand more, the left-handers gestured using both hands equally. Overall, our findings contradict the existing literature on the body specificity theory. Possible reasons for the opposing results will be discussed.