Psychology Today59%
Are People With ADHD Symptoms More Likely to Be Left-Handed? 12%
By Sebastian Ocklenburg7% Ph.D.33%
8/2/2026, 2:40:01 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 18 faulty reasoning types, including Overconfidence Bias, Ambiguity (Equivocation), and Recency Bias, with Appeal to Authority as the most egregious example at 21.3% saturation with 114 hits. Analysis detected 696 faulty-reasoning hits from 535 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 21.4% and a BS Rank of 12% (27,043 of 30,584 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 88.40% of the article peer group.
Occasionally, there are anecdotal reports on the internet that people with ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) are more commonly left-handed or mixed-handed than the average person, but is there actually scientific evidence for this idea?
Turns out: there is scientific evidence supporting this idea.
In 2022, a meta-analysis on handedness in people with ADHD was published (Nastou et al., 2022).
A meta-analysis is a statistical integration of data from several original studies so that the sample size is very large and the results are very trustworthy.
The meta-analysis showed that people with ADHD had a statistically significant increase in non-right-handedness (left-handedness and mixed-handedness combined) compared to people without ADHD.
People with ADHD had a 27.3% chance of being mixed- or left-handed compared to 18.1% of people without ADHD.
What, however, was unclear in this meta-analysis, was whether attention deficit hyperactivity disorder symptoms (like hyperactivity and inattention symptoms) in people without a clear ADHD diagnosis are also linked to more left-handedness and mixed-handedness.
A new study on the association between handedness and mental health symptoms in children in the general population
A new study entitled “Writing hand preference and child mental health in the general population: Findings from the Millennium Cohort Study,” now published in the scientific journal Laterality, was focused on the association between handedness and mental health symptoms in children in the general population (Sifaki and Flouri, 2026).
In the study, conducted by scientists Maria Sifaki and Eirini Flouri from University College London, data from almost 8,000 children (roughly half of them girls) from the U.K.’s Millennium Cohort Study were analyzed.
In this study, the parents of the children reported on several different symptoms their children showed at ages 3, 5, 7, 11, and 14 years.
These symptoms included:
Emotional difficulties.
Conduct difficulties.
Hyperactivity/inattention problems.
Peer difficulties.
Difficulties with prosocial behavior.
Moreover, the children’s handedness was assessed at age 14.
Results of the study: The strongest association was found for hyperactivity/inattention problems
Overall, about 87% of children in the study were right-handed, and about 13% were not right-handed, with about 12% being left-handed and 1% being mixed-handed.
The associations with the assessed symptoms were quite interesting.
For most symptoms, there were no statistically significant associations at all.
For conduct problems, the non-right-handed group had more difficulties than the right-handed group, but only at age 5, not at any other age, showing that the association is not very stable over time.
The strongest effects were clearly found for hyperactivity/inattention problems.
Here, the non-right-handed group had more difficulties than the right-handed group at ages 5, 7, 11, and 14.
Thus, these differences were present at almost all age groups, showing a stable association between hyperactivity/inattention problems and not being right-handed.
Takeaway
The results of the study confirm the results of the earlier meta-analysis, but also broaden them.
They show that the association between ADHD and non-right-handedness is not limited to people with a clinical ADHD diagnosis.
Instead, also children in the general population with hyperactivity or inattention problems have a higher chance of being left-handed or mixed-handed than children without those symptoms.
These findings provide further evidence for a link between neurodiversity and left-handedness and mixed-handedness.
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Analysis
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