Alleged Perils Of Left-Handedness Don’t Always Hold Up

NPR:

I recently stumbled upon a description of research out of Yale that suggested there was a link between left-handedness and psychotic disorders like schizophrenia.

Forty percent of those with psychotic disorders are lefties, one of the researchers . That startled me. Only about 10 percent of people in the general population are left-handed. I’m one of them.

I’ve often read that I’m going to die earlier. Also, I’m bad with scissors. And now, it seemed, I’m at high risk for mental illness. Was my hand preference a lifelong curse?

The short answer: No.

After getting both my hands on the , I found that the work, while intriguing, falls far short of being conclusive.

The study, published in the journal SAGE Open, looked at the prevalence of left-handedness among people with mood disorders, like depression, and those with psychotic disorders.

…

“There’s a 150-year history of trying to connect left-handedness to every pathology they can think of,” Clare Porac, a psychology professor at Penn State Erie, tells Shots. “One of the issues … is the following notion: Everyone should be right-handed, and if not, there’s something wrong with the brain.”

Read the whole story: NPR