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Updated: Jan 26, 2026

An Olfactory Preference Test for Measuring Olfactory Hedonic Biases in Mouse Models of Depression
Published on: July 11, 2025
The left-cradling bias and its relationship with empathy and depression
Gianluca Malatesta1, Daniele Marzoli2, Maria Rapino3
1Department of Psychological, Health and Territorial Sciences, University "G. d'Annunzio" of Chieti-Pescara, Via dei Vestini, 31, I-66100, Chieti, Italy. gianluca.malatesta@unich.it.
Abstract:
Women usually cradle their infants to the left of their body midline. Research showed that the left cradling could be altered by affective symptoms in mothers, so that right cradling might be associated with a reduced ability to become emotionally involved with the infant. In this study, we assessed cradling-side bias (using family photo inspection and an imagination task), as well as depression and empathy, in 50 healthy mothers of 0-3 years old children. The main finding was that the strength of the left-cradling bias was negatively related with participants' depression scores and slightly positively related with their empathy scores. Our results thus provide further evidence that cradling-side preferences can represent an evolutionary proxy of mother's affective state, influencing the early development of the infant social brain and behaviour.
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