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‘Left’ and ‘Right’ appear cross-culturally as general symbols for polar opposites (such as good-bad, male-female, life-death (NEEDHAM 29)). The right usually possesses positive connotations and is associated with concepts such as goodness, justice, reason and skill while the left possesses negative connotations and is associated with concepts such as evil, irrationality and clumsiness.
The words ‘sinister’ and ‘dexterous’ (whose Latin roots mean left and right) and ‘gauche’ and ‘adroit’ (whose French roots mean left and right) attest to this symbolic dichotomy at the etymological level. Tomkins has traced the presence of left versus right dichotomies throughout the history of Western man's philosophical, scientific and artistic endeavours (TOMKINS 34). Even at the inception of Christian culture the left was treated as undesirable. The Gospel of Matthew states: ‘and He will place the sheep on His right and the goats at His left…. Then He will say to those at His left, “begone from Me, accursed ones, to the everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels”’. Commenting on the symbolism of the left and right, Bruner writes: ‘Since childhood, I have been enchanted by the fact and the symbolism of the right and the left—the one the doer, the other the dreamer, the right is order and lawfulness, le droit. Its beauties are those of geometry and taut implication. Reaching for knowledge with the right hand is science. Yet to say that much of science is to overlook one of its excitements, for the greatest hypotheses of science are gifts carried in the left’ (BRUNER 4, pp. 2-3).
Studies such as Domhoff's have found that people rate the concept ‘left’ as ‘bad’, ‘dark’, ‘profane’ and ‘female’ while the concept ‘right’ was rated in the opposite direction (DOMHOFF 9).
The left-right conceptualisation has been carried over into the research on hemispheric functioning which has presented a consistent pattern of functional differences between the left and right hemisph