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. 2019 Apr-Jun;17(2):1474704919848117.
doi: 10.1177/1474704919848117.

The Relationship Between the Left-Cradling Bias and Attachment to Parents and Partner

Gianluca Malatesta  1 , Daniele Marzoli  1 , Chiara Piccioni  1 , Luca Tommasi  1
Affiliations

The Relationship Between the Left-Cradling Bias and Attachment to Parents and Partner

Gianluca Malatesta et al. Evol Psychol. 2019 Apr-Jun.

Abstract

Mothers usually cradle their infants to the left of their body midline, an asymmetry that seems to be a typically female lateral preference. This bias is deemed to be an evolutionary facilitator of communication between cradling and cradled individuals and is believed to be strongly related to hemispheric specialization for complex socio-affective behaviors. Thus, left cradling might facilitate affective interactions in females with typical brain organization, probably due to a right-hemisphere dominance for social attachment. In this study, we investigated cradling-side preferences in 288 young females as a function of their attachment styles to parents and partners. A left-cradling bias was more frequent in participants experiencing positive relationships with their mother and romantic partners. These findings indicate that the left-cradling bias may be associated with high-quality social attachment behaviors in females and, therefore, can be considered as a natural index of socio-emotional attunement between the cradling and cradled individuals.

Keywords: attachment styles; behavioral bias; hemispheric dominance; mother–infant relationship; social cognition.

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Conflict of interest statement

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Graphic representation of left-cradling behavior.
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
Graphic representation of the six trials performed by each participant in the cradling task.
Figure 3.
Figure 3.
Percentage of left cradlers and right cradlers in participants categorized according to the attachment to the mother, father, and partner (* indicates significance of p < .05; ** indicate significance of p < .005; the dashed line indicates the chance level [50%]). For each subgroup, participant number (N) and mean cradling-bias index (M) are presented.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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