Tuesday, September 6, 2022

On Handedness


World's biggest study of left-handedness
Apr 2020, phys.org

Meta-analysis of 200 studies for over 2 million people:

  • Prevalence - Left-handedness prevalence lies between 9.3% to 18.1%, with the best overall estimate being 10.6%
  • Self-Reporting Doesn't Work - Papadatou-Pastou, Martin, and Munafò (2013) found that self-classification matched writing hand in every case, while that the mismatch between self-classification and hand preference inventories was 0.4% for right-handers, but 13.5% for left-handers.
  • Ancestry - Αncestry was extracted from 167 studies. Τhere was clear evidence of a  moderating  effect  of  ancestry. The prevalence of left-handedness was found to be 11.12% when the study participants were  of European ancestry (184  datasets), 7.71% when the study participants were of sub-Saharan  African ancestry (9 datasets),  and 5.69% when study participants were of East Asian ancestry (23  datasets) ... non-right-handedness in Hong Kong (about 8%) is higher than in most previous studies in Asian populations (Zheng et al., 2019, preprint).
  • Generational - Gilbert and Wysocki (1992) report data from over 1,100,000 individuals and show that the prevalence of left-handedness was only 3% for those born in 1900 rising up to almost 12% for those born in 1945 onwards.
  • Moderator - The results of our meta-analysis clearly indicate that both assessment instrument [the type of questionaire etc] and classification scheme [for example, one study could ask left-right and another could ask left-ambidextrous-right, and they would have different outcomes] for handedness significantly affect handedness rates.

via National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, University of Oxford, University of Bristol, Ruhr University Bochum, and St Andrews: Marietta Papadatou-Pastou et al. Human handedness: A meta-analysis., Psychological Bulletin (2020). DOI: 10.1037/bul0000229

Image credit: thermal imagery tech

No comments:

Post a Comment