The relationships among self-contact and gesturing scores of 27 female undergraduate psychology students in 2 neutral and 2 emotional stimulus situations have been examined. To study the role of cerebral dominance, the self-contact and gesturing behaviors produced by the left and right halves of the body have been separately analyzed. In the emotional situations there was enhancement of the self-contact score on the left side of the body, but in one of the two, self-contact scores on the left were associated with high free-gesturing scores on the right side of the body. The self-contact score increases on the right side of the body in the situation of a first social interaction. The role of the self-contact as an anxiety-reducing system is discussed.

We hypothesized that during perception of reversible figures the direction of gaze toward a specific perceptual focal point plays a determining role in the identification of the images, i.e., when subjects are asked by the experimenter to perceive one of the two images, a displacement of the eyes toward a specific spatial area of the figure occurs. For each image we think there is a particular point of the figure which acts as perceptual organizer. The stimuli were the Hill and Boring, Ehrenstein, Rubin, and Schroeder reversible figures. Subjects were 47 undergraduate psychology students (32 women and 15 men). The number of ocular movements toward a different spatial direction were calculated for each suggested image of the reversing figure. Analysis showed that, in perceiving reversing figures, specific ocular displacements were present for each suggested image.

A group of 20 middle-class women between 20 and 40 yr. of age and in the third trimester of pregnancy was compared with a control group of 20 non-pregnant women for cutaneous sensitivity (to a tickle) and for modifications of body schema which were hypothesized to occur during pregnancy. Latency and actual duration were considered in the perception of the tickle. Body schema were studied using two of Fisher's tests, Body Prominence and Body Cathexis. Pregnancy leads to modifications in sensitivity to tickle, specifically with regard to the right half of the body and to some extent in body schema.

We examined the correlations among eye-contact, gesturing, and self-contact behaviors for 26 female university students during different neutral and emotional situations. There was a statistically significant positive correlation between eye-contact and right gesturing in two of four situations (rs, .37, .33) and a significant positive correlation (.33) between left self-contact and eye-contact during an initial relational contact.

We examined the tickle sensitivity of 46 female psychology students with reference to different areas of the body and cerebral dominance. Analysis indicated a significant difference between two halves of the body for latency and not for duration. The dimensional approach, as we have suggested for other research on cerebral dominance, singled out for both latency and duration of tickle three groups of dominance: right, left, and nondominant subjects.