Different Bodies, Different Minds

Do people with different kinds of bodies think differently? According to the body-specificity hypothesis (Casasanto, 2009), they should. In this article, I review evidence that right- and left-handers, who perform actions in systematically different ways, use correspondingly different areas of the brain for imagining actions and representing the meanings of action verbs. Beyond concrete actions, the way people use their hands also influences the way they represent abstract ideas with positive and negative emotional valence like “goodness,” “honesty,” and “intelligence” and how they communicate about these ideas in spontaneous speech and gesture. Changing how people use their right and left hands can cause them…

• JS
  James S. McDonnell Foundation
• ER
  European Regional Development Fund

  Award: P09-SEJ-4772