Handedness and depression : evidence from a large population survey

There is a considerable body of research arguing for an association between psychotic disorders and atypical brain lateralization – the latter usually being
indicated by non-righthandedness. By contrast, there has been less attention
given to a possible link between handedness and affective disorders and, unlike the case of psychosis, there is no obvious a priori biological reason for such a link. There are very studies of this in normal populations. This paper uses a new large population survey from twelve European countries to measure the association between handedness and depression. It is found that, using three different measures, left-handers are significantly more likely to have depressive symptoms that right-handers. For example left-handers are
about 5% more likely to have reported having ever experienced symptoms of
depression compared to about 27% of the total sample. There is no evidence that this effects differs between men and women.