Paranoid males have reduced lateralisation for processing of negative emotions: An investigation using the chimeric faces test Victoria J. Bourne 1 and Ryan T. McKay 1,2 1 Department of Psychology, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK 2 ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders, Macquarie University, NSW, Australia Reduced strength of lateralisation in patients with schizophrenia has been reported in a number of studies. However the exact nature of this relationship remains unclear. In this study, lateralisation for processing emotional faces was measured using the chimeric faces test and examined in relation to paranoia in a non-clinical sample. For males only, those with higher scores on a paranoia questionnaire had reduced lateralisation for processing negative facial emotion. For females there were no significant relationships. These findings suggest that atypical patterns of lateralisation for processing emotional stimuli may be implicated in, or associated with, increased levels of paranoia. Keywords: Emotion lateralisation; Paranoia; Self-esteem; Sex differences; Chimeric faces test. Individual differences in functional lateralisation have frequently been researched and debated in recent years. The typical pattern is for language processing to be lateralised to the left hemisphere and for face and emotion processing to be lateralised to the right. However, there is variability in lateralisation (and strength of lateralisation) for various functions, and much research has attempted to explain this variability. This work has tended to fall into two relatively distinct, but certainly not mutually exclusive, areas of research: individual differences and clinical disorders. In this paper we report an investigation of variability in strength of lateralisation across the six basic emotions in relation to two clinically relevant traits: paranoia and self-esteem. Address correspondence to: Victoria Bourne, Department of Psychology, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, Surrey, TW20 0EX UK. E-mail: victoria.bourne@rhul.ac.uk Laterality , 2013 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1357650X.2013.809728 # 2013 Taylor & Francis Downloaded by [Royal Holloway, University of London] at 02:56 12 July 2013