Lateral Eye Movements and Personality Style

Abstract

Recent evidence suggests there might be a relationship between conjugate lateral eye movements in response to questioning and personality style (2). Such eye movements are usually accepted as an index of inferred hemispheric activation or hemisphericiry, with the direction of response thought to be contralateral to the activated hemisphere. Typically, left movers have been described as more inner-directed, creative. imaginative, and emotional than right movers who are reported to be more logical, analytic, critical, and verbal. A recent study (4) suggested that differential hemispheric activation might account for obsessoid and hysteroid personality styles. Using lateral eye movements as an index of inferred hemispheric activation obsessoid individuals seem to show a preference for a left-hemisphere-processing style and hysteroid persons show a similar preference for a right-hemisphere-processing style. The present study reexamined this relationship using the Hysteroid-Obsessoid Questionnaire (I), a more carefully standardized assessment of these two personality styles than chat used before (4). However, rather than selecting obsessoid and hysteroid subjects from an initial pool, the present study investigated those subjects who showed the most consistent hemisphericity as indicated by eye-movements and then assessed differences in personality style. The subjects were 80 right-handed college stud en^ selected from an original pool of 210, on the basis of their eye-movements to questions. The technique was identical to that used elsewhere (4). These subjects were then split into two groups of 40; in one group were those individuals showing the most consistent left-eye movements to questions (29 males, 11 females) and in the other were those showing the most consistent right-eye movements to questions (27 males, 13 females). Each subject was then asked to fill out the Hysteroid-Obsessoid Questionnaire. The mean score for the left movers (24.82, SD = 5.16) was not significantly different from the mean score for the right movers (23.91, SD = 4.91), suggesting that hemispheric activation was not related to this personality measure. These results question earlier results (4) and suggest that che relationship be