Lateral asymmetries in infants’ regulatory and communicative gestures

This chapter examines whether differences in the lateralization of expressive and regulatory gestures may reflect different hemispheric activity. It evaluates the differential utilization and lateralization by infants of socioemotional expressive gestures and self-directed coping. Other directed gestures were common during the play and reunion and self directed behaviors were common during the still-face phases of the Face-to-Face Still-Face paradigm (FFSF). These findings suggest that during the FFSF infants showed greater right hemisphere activation and that the activation is associated with different kind of gestures related to episode. Overall differential distribution of self and other directed behaviors in relation to the different social contexts suggests that the regulatory capacities of the infant are highly tuned and sophisticated. Support for a lateralization of self and other directed behaviors to the right hemisphere was found, lending support to views of the specialization of the right hemisphere for both regulatory and communicative emotional processing.