Does digital grabbing boost affectivity in less empathic users? An interactive approach to affective laterality: Empathy, hand dominance, and action-context shape pleasantness experience

Abstract

This study investigates the interplay between dispositional empathy and emotional processing during embodied digital interactions. It builds upon the Spatial Affective Interaction (SAI) framework, which integrates neurobehavioral and cognitive perspectives on affective laterality, affective spatialization, and hand-proximity effects. The research particularly focuses on how lateralized manual interactions with emotional images (“emotional grabbing”) affect users’ pleasantness experiences. A sample of 240 right-handed participants used either their dominant right hand or non-dominant left hand to engage with 40 emotional images (20 pleasant and 20 unpleasant) using ipsilateral (same hand-side) or contralateral (opposite hand-side) interactions in a touchscreen environment. Key findings reveal asymmetries in pleasantness experiences that depend on hand dominance, ipsilateral interactions, and empathy levels. Specifically, participants reporting lower empathy associated increased pleasantness after using the dominant right hand to interact with right-positioned pleasant images. Conversely, interactions with left-positioned unpleasant images using the non-dominant left hand were associated with a heightened unpleasantness among low-empathy participants, with the opposite pattern observed in high-empathy individuals. These findings suggest that “emotional grabbing” may enhance sensitivity to emotional content in less empathic individuals, possibly by compensating an impaired activation of the action-observation network (AON), which integrates sensorimotor and empathy processes. The study underscores the relevance of considering hand dominance, emotional valence, and empathy in the future design of embodied digital interactions, to enhance emotional experiences of individuals with explicit empathy deficits.