Does body-specificity stand on solid ground? Z-curving the body-specific association between valence and lateral space

The body-specificity hypothesis proposes that people with different bodies should also have different conceptual systems. The test case of this hypothesis has been the association of emotional valence (good vs. bad) with lateral space (left vs. right) in people of different handedness. As expected, right-handers tend to associate the good with right space, whereas left-handers show the opposite association. This body-specific effect has been very influential and followed up by an important number of studies. Here, we undertake a systematic examination of the quality of this literature by means of z-curve analysis. The results show that statistical power reaches the conventionally accepted level of 80% in the overall analysis and also in the subset of studies using binomial tasks, whereas it is less concinvingly high in reaction time studies. Moreover, the file drawer rate is low. All in all, the literature about space-valence body-specificity appears reasonably solid, with room for improvement in reaction time tasks.