A study from Sam Houston University found that the left ear is better at picking up emotional words than the right. Sixty-two men and women listened to some emotional words (“loving”) and some neutral words (“combine”) read in a voice devoid of emotion, with the words presented to the left or right ear. In an abstract on MITCogNet, study authors T.C. Sim and Carolyn Martinez write, “When emotion stimuli appeared on the left ear, the accuracy of recall was higher, with a mean of 64.43% and 58.15% for the right ear. Our study shows that in the face of competing verbal information, emotional words compete more strongly when they are presented through the left ear.”
An NIH abstract on the study notes that the “findings are consistent with the role of the right hemisphere in the perception of emotional information.”
