Where the ‘bad’ and the ‘good’ go: A multi-lab direct replication report of Casasanto (2009, Experiment 1)
Yuki Yamada, Xue Jin, Panpan Li, Susana Ruiz Fernández, Asil Ali Özdoğru, Şahsenem Sarı, Sergio Cervera‐Torres, José Antonio Hinojosa, Pedro R. Montoro, Bedoor AlShebli, Aidos Bolatov, Grant McGeechan, Mircea Zloteanu, Irene Razpurker‐Apfeld, Adil Samekin, Nurit Tal‐Or, Julián Tejada, Raquel Meister Ko. Freitag, Omid Khatin‐Zadeh, Hassan Banaruee, Nicolas Robin, Guillermo Briseño‐Sánchez, Carlos Barrera-Causil, Fernando Marmolejo‐Ramos
Abstract
Casasanto (Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 138, 351-367, 2009) conceptualised the body-specificity hypothesis by empirically finding that right-handed people tend to associate a positive valence with the right side and a negative valence with the left side, whilst left-handed people tend to associate a positive valence with the left side and negative valence with the right side. Thus, this was the first paper that showed a body-specific space-valence mapping. These highly influential findings led to a substantial body of research and follow-up studies, which could confirm the original findings on a conceptual level. However, direct replications of the original study are scarce. Against this backdrop and given the replication crisis in psychology, we conducted a direct replication of Casasanto's original study with 2,222 participants from 12 countries to examine the aforementioned effects in general and also in a cross-cultural comparison. Our results support Casasanto's findings that right-handed people associate the right side with positivity and the left side with negativity and vice versa for left-handers.