Despite overall physiological bilateral symmetry, many species exhibit
lateralized biases, i.e., preferences for right- or left-oriented behavior. When
approaching prey, for example, some predator species favor their right eye; some
prey species respond more quickly when their left eye detects a predator. Similar
behavioral asymmetries occur in humans. Most notable is right- and lefthandedness; less notable is the tendency to turn right when entering a room.
Paul Farnsworth found that more successful students tended to choose seats near
the front, a little to the right. He argued that external factors such as teacher
location might have affected this lateral bias. But it is now known that processing
differences between the two brain hemispheres can also contribute to behavioral
asymmetries.
George Karev found that when presented with a movie theater seating
diagram, right-handed people were more likely than left-handed people to choose
a seat on the right, facing front. But he hypothesized that, since the right
hemisphere processes visuospatial and emotional information, the people who
chose right-side seats did so because that would put the screen in their left visual
field, optimizing information flow to the right hemisphere.
Although the right hemisphere is thought to be dominant in processing
emotion, some evidence suggests that the left hemisphere plays a role. The
valence model proposes that the left and right hemispheres process positive and
negative emotion respectively, while the approach-withdrawal model posits that
the left hemisphere processes emotion expressed in approach behavior and the
right hemisphere processes emotion expressed in withdrawal behavior.
Victoria Harms and colleagues suggested that since a paper seating plan was
used in the theater-seating studies by Karev and others, the exhibited preference
might be due simply to handedness: people choose the same side of the paper as
their favored hand. Consequently, the Harms research was designed to study
choices in an actual movie theater. Also, hoping to distinguish between various
explanations, they studied seating chaices for comedies (presumed to contain
positive emotional content), dramas (presumed to contain negative emotional
content), and documentaries (presumed to have balanced emotional content).
They found significant—though not universal—preference for seats on the right,
facing front, regardless of movie genre and of handedness.
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