Motoric indicators of laterality and determination of lateral dominance in schizophrenia

The literature suggests that schizophrenics exhibit reduced or reversed cerebral lateral dominance relative to normal control subjects. An hypothesis which predicted reduced or reversed cerebral laterality for schizophrenics was tested on 60 young, familially right-handed males, with 20 men in each of the following three groups: schizophrenic inpatients, nonschizophrenic psychiatric inpatient controls, and normal controls. The subjects were administered a battery of seven measures of cerebral laterality. The application of multivariate statistical techniques showed groups did not differ significantly in the degree or the direction of their cerebral lateral dominance. Also there were no significant correlations between the measures of laterality. The findings suggest that cerebral lateral dominance is not necessarily altered concomitantly with psychopathology but rather that it is a complex phenomenon which may not be reliably determined on the basis of simple behavioral characteristics.