The participant’s task was to indicate which chimera looked happier. For the Gender test, we selected the neutral expressions of an additional six male and six female posers from the database. The procedure for constructing the chimeras was similar to the one described above, except that now the combined face halves were from two different posers: a male and female poser (see Fig. 1b). The resulting 48 images were presented in 24 trials, with the task of the participant being to indicate which of the two chimeras looked more feminine. Prospective participants

were first tested for handedness. Next, a questionnaire was administered and permission Selleck Daporinad was asked to contact the mother (or father or other caretaker, in case the mother was not available; this happened in none of the cases). If the participant agreed, the mother was contacted immediately and asked whether she would be willing to participate in the study and answer a number of questions about her child. It was explained what the purpose of the study was and that the results would be encoded anonymously. If consenting to participate (which all did), the mother was given a questionnaire and tested for handedness and depressive symptoms post-partum. Next, the participant was subjected to

the two face tests, first the Emotion and then the Gender chimeras test. The stimuli were presented on a computer screen by means of the software program Powerpoint (slide-show). The participant gave his/her choice (“top”, “bottom” or “don’t know”) on each trial selleck chemicals verbally. The answer was registered by the experimenter and later entered into a computer. Following the procedure of Levy et al. (1983), we calculated for each participant a face encoding asymmetry score by subtracting the number of trials on which the chimera had been chosen with the happy/female side to the left from the trials on which the chimera had been chosen with the happy/female

side to the right. The total was then divided by the number of trials on which the participant had reached a decision (i.e. without the trials on which the participant couldn’t make a choice; this happened in less than 1% of the trials in the Emotion test and 2% in the Gender test). Thus, a left-bias would be indicated by a negative asymmetry Carnitine palmitoyltransferase II score, a right bias by a positive asymmetry score. The results were then analysed statistically with SPSS. Analyses were carried out with independent t-tests, one-tailed, unless otherwise specified. As in prior studies, the participants in the present study – all right-handed – showed a left-bias (depicted by the negative means in Table 1) which was significantly different from zero, in both the Emotion and the Gender test and this was also true when both left-held and right-held participant groups were considered separately.