Handedness and anxiety: a review

ABSTRACT

Handedness is a core phenotype in clinical laterality research and several different disorders such as schizophrenia and autism spectrum disorders have been linked to a higher prevalence of non-right-handedness. Moreover, subclinical personality traits like schizotypy have been linked to a higher prevalence of non-right-handedness. The association with handedness is poorly understood for generalized anxiety disorder and specific phobias, as well as for state and trait anxiety and fear of specific stimuli in nonclinical samples. Therefore, we performed a narrative review of studies investigating handedness in anxiety disorders patients and studies that compared anxiety scores between different handedness groups. Unlike schizophrenia and autism spectrum disorders, there seems to be no strong association between anxiety disorders and handedness in adult patients, except for specific phobias. Studies often had small sample sizes and therefore a high risk to report spurious findings. Similar findings were reported in most non-clinical studies. Importantly, familial handedness affects phobia risk and antenatal maternal anxiety increased the probability of mixed-handedness. This suggests that a transgenerational, developmental perspective is essential to better understand the complex interrelations between handedness and anxiety. Familial and especially maternal handedness and anxiety disorders should be integrated into future studies on handedness and anxiety whenever possible.

KEYWORDS:

• Anxiety disorders
• social phobia
• handedness
• hemispheric asymmetry
• laterality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

This is a narrative review without data collection. Therefore, no data that could potentially be shared exists for this article.

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Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.