Familiarity-and-Liking Relationship Under Conditions of Induced Lateral Orientation

Abstract

Right-handed subjects who oriented their bodies and their attention toward their right produced a significant relationship between their rated familiarity with and liking for several well-known individuals. Those induced to orient toward their left showed no such effect. It is argued that such orientation produces relatively greater activation of the contralateral hemisphere, and experiments and reviews are cited which show that the left hemisphere has been suggested as the site for both processing of familiar stimuli and positive affect. Even if familiarity does activate liking by some means by virtue of being predominantly processed in the same hemisphere, it is not known how this occurs nor how it is altered by lateralized attention.