The effects of emotion and ocular dominance on lateral eye movement

Lateral eye movements (LEMs) in response to emotional and nonemotional instructions were examined. For the emotional task, a new procedure is utilized which requires subjects to generate emotional images of positive and negative valence in auditory, visual and tactile modalities. Forty-four normal adult males and females (22 right-handers, 22 left-handers) participated in the experiment. Overall, subjects looked significantly more to the left than to the right in response to emotional instructions, suggesting greater right hemisphere involvement in the generation of emotional images. The same subjects showed no directional bias in response to nonemotional instructions. Although gender, handedness and familial sinistrality did not mediate the direction of eye movements, ocular dominance had an effect. For left-handed subjects, the direction of eye movements to nonemotional instructions was consistent with eyedness, e.g., right-eyed subjects produced right-sided LEMs, and left-eyed subjects produced left-sided LEMs.