There is an almost universal association ofrightwithlife, the right and the positive, and ofthe leftwithdeath, the inappropriate and the bad. This trend is the result of both cultural and linguistic patterns and our own motor experience. Culture takes this particular motor trait and transforms it into dogma, so that, for example, at a table we always tend toplace our trusted person on the right. But how does this affect left-handers, less numerous than right-handers? This is what the researcher from the University of Granada Julio Santiago wanted to find out, who has shown that these people dissociate themselves from this cultural influence and choose an inverse relationship.
According to Professor Santiago, the association of the right with the pleasant and the left with the unpleasant existsThousands of years ago, when the peoples who inhabited the Northern Hemisphere conceived thesunriselike birth, its setting like death and the journey between the two like life. And it is that in this part of the globe the Sun does not pass through the center of the sky, but a little to the right. Even then, the right had a privileged value. The expert adds that this domain extends tolanguage, where for example the word“right”is used to designate the set oflaws that support equality and justice, while the term“Sinister”derives fromsinister, leftIn latin.
Julio Santiago has carried out, in this sense, a bibliographic review on all the scientific work related to this topic and has recently published an article in the journalCognitive Science: Electronic Journal of Disclosurein which he assesses how this tendency affects left-handed people, who tend to associate the left with the good and the pleasant and the right with the bad.
The researcher emphasizes that “all left-handed people very often experience the sensation of having been born in the wrong world. The handlebars of a bike, the musical instruments, the scissors … everything has been designed for right-handed users. That is why they are forced to adapt to these uses and develop their right hand to the fullest.
