Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Research has shown that individual variation in our bodies,such as differential hand dominance, can influence the way thatwe interact with and perceive the world (Casasanto, 2009). Forexample, right-handed individuals are more likely to associatetheir right spatial plane as more positive than their left, an effectthat is switched in left-handed individuals. Here, we exploredwhether asking participants to use their dominant (“good”)versus nondominant (“bad”) hand on a motor task influencedsubsequent valanced face judgment. Results demonstrate thatsimply asking a participant to use their right or left hand tocomplete a task can have a significant effect on the perceivedvalence of neutral faces. These findings add to the evidencethat the way we physically interact with our world may haveimportant consequences for our perceptions of social stimuli.