Mainly Visual Aspects of Emotional Laterality in Cognitively Developed and Highly Social Mammals—A Systematic Review

Abstract

Several studies have shown that emotions are asymmetrically represented in the human brain and have proposed three main models (the ‘right hemisphere hypothesis’, the ‘approach-withdrawal hypothesis’ and the ‘valence hypothesis’) that give different accounts of this emotional laterality. Furthermore, in recent years, many investigations have suggested that a similar emotional laterality may also exist in different animal taxa. However, results of a previous systematic review of emotional laterality in non-human primates have shown that some of these studies might be criticized from the methodological point of view and support only in part the hypothesis of a continuum in emotional laterality across vertebrates. The aim of the present review therefore consisted in trying to expand this survey to other cognitively developed and highly social mammals, focusing attention on mainly visual aspects of emotional laterality, in studies conducted on the animal categories of horses, elephants, dolphins and whales. The 35 studies included in the review took into account three aspects of mainly visual emotional laterality, namely: (a) visual asymmetries for positive/familiar vs. negative/novel stimuli; (b) lateral position preference in mother–offspring or other affiliative interactions; (c) lateral position preference in antagonistic interactions. In agreement with data obtained from human studies that have evaluated comprehension or expression of emotions at the facial or vocal level, these results suggest that a general but graded right-hemisphere prevalence in the processing of emotions can be found at the visual level in cognitively developed non-primate social mammals. Some methodological problems and some implications of these results for human psychopathology are briefly discussed.