In emotionally charged situations, we tend to hug each other from the left side more often than in neutral contexts. Biopsychologists at Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB), headed by Julian Packheiser, Noemi Rook and assistant professor Dr Sebastian Ocklenburg, established this fact by evaluating more than 2,500 hugs. They attribute this ratio to the way emotions are processed in the respective brain hemispheres. Moreover, they observed that predictions about which hand will be on top during an embrace can be based on the participants’ handedness and footedness. Their results were published in the journal “Psychological Research” on January 18, 2018.
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