Artistic turns: laterality in paintings of kisses and embraces

Many lateral biases exist in human behavior, often implicit and not deliberated. Romantic kissing and embracing received experimental attention in the last three decades. We investigated laterality in paintings depicting these social interactions using two methodologies to assess whether painters depicted such biases and whether these biases could be due to observers' aesthetic preferences or painters' ability in portraying naturalistic interactions. In Study 1, we inspected about 190,000 artworks available online to classify leftward and rightward biases in romantic kisses and embraces. The comparison of 103 paintings depicting clearly lateralized interactions revealed a significant rightward bias in romantic kissing (66%) and a trend toward a leftward bias (62%) for embraces, aligning with naturalistic studies of human interactions. In Study 2, 128 participants expressed their aesthetic preference between the paintings selected in Study 1 and their vertically mirrored versions. A preference for the original paintings over their mirrored versions emerged, especially when presented in the upper portion of the screen, but no significant preference for the typical lateralization of kissing and embracing was found. These findings suggest that artists' alignment with naturalistic biases could be due to familiarity and exposure to asymmetric interactions rather than observers' aesthetic preferences.