Eysenck’s model of personality and psychopathological components in right- and left-handers

The link between handedness, personality, and psychopathology remains unclear. The objective of this study is to investigate in right- and left-handers the link between the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (EPQ) scores and psychopathology status in a non-clinical sample of young adults. The EPQ, the Symptom Checklist 90 and the Edinburgh Handedness Inventory were completed by 84 normal young adults, 43 left-handers (20 males) and 41 right-handers (21 males). Canonical correlation analysis revealed that right-handers exhibited a positive association between the EPQ-neuroticism score and the symptom-fields of obsessive–compulsive, anxiety, depression and hostility. In left-handers, the EPQ-neuroticism score was positively associated with the symptom-fields of depression, psychoticism, paranoid ideation, anxiety, interpersonal sensitivity, phobic anxiety, hostility, and somatisation. Additionally, right-handers showed a protective effect of the combination of high EPQ-extraversion with low EPQ-psychoticism on the development of four psychopathology symptom-fields, namely interpersonal sensitivity, depression, psychoticism, and obsessive–compulsive behavior. These findings suggest that personality patterns, such as high levels of neuroticism, in relationship to handedness may induce phenotypic psychopathological variations.