We predicted that right-held in comparison to left-held individuals would show a reduced left-bias for both emotion and gender information in faces, indicating a reduced right-hemisphere lateralisation for face processing and not only for facial emotion. Students from the universities

in Nijmegen, Sunitinib in vivo the Netherlands (Radboud University Nijmegen and HAN University of Applied Sciences) were invited to participate in the study if they were right-handed and, to the best of their knowledge, had been entirely bottle-fed as an infant. Right-handed students with a left-handed mother were particularly encouraged to participate in the study, because we foresaw an underrepresentation of left-handed – and consequently probably right-holding mothers – otherwise, with left-handedness being much less common in the general population. Prospective participants were told they would be presented with visual stimuli on a computer screen, but not that these stimuli were faces. Initially 73 students enrolled in the study. All subjects gave informed consent to participation. The

study was approved of Y-27632 ic50 by the ethics committee of the Faculty of Social Sciences, Radboud University Nijmegen. To minimise the possible influence of other factors on face processing development, the participants were further selected on the basis of the information obtained from them and their mothers by means of questionnaires, and depression and handedness scores. The questionnaire for the participants entailed questions about possible visual

deficits (e.g. squint, amblyopia, reduced vision in one or two eyes), that for the mothers questions about the neonatal period, the feeding history during the first half year (e.g. bottle-feeding versus breast-feeding, involvement of other caregivers, infant holding-side preference) and possible visual, neurological and/or developmental filipin disorders in their child. Participants and mothers were also tested for symptoms of depression in present (participants) and past (mothers) by means of the 16 depression items from the Dutch version of the Symptom Checklist-90-R (see Derogatis, 1986 and Derogatis et al., 1974). According to the manual the internal consistency of the depression scale for a sample of participants without psychopathology (normal population) is 0.91; test–retest reliabilities for two periods of one month were 0.76 and 0.86, and for a period of two months 0.72. Both convergent and divergent validity were in the expected direction. Correlations were low for divergent validity and in the medium ranges for convergent validity (Arrindell & Ettema, 2003). Mothers were asked to answer the questions for the post-partum period in retrospect: we felt that a severe post-partum depression was likely to be remembered. The motivation to do so was that maternal depression may in itself have an effect on face processing development (e.g.