Meta-analysis on the association between handedness and pedophilia

Pedophilia is a sexual preference disorder that has been linked to neurodevelopmental alterations in diagnosed individuals. One common biomarker for atypical neurodevelopment are elevated levels of atypical handedness as individuals with several neurodevelopmental disorders show increased levels of left or mixed hand preference. Few primary studies have indicated that atypical handedness could also be more prevalent in pedophilia. However, individual studies are prone to sampling biases and a comprehensive synthesis of the literature on this topic is still missing. In this pre-registered study, we performed a meta-analysis on k = 13 studies that were searched in PubMed, Web of Science and Google Scholar (until January 2023). These 13 studies measured hand preference in n = 1194 individuals with pedophilia and n = 5648 controls. Contrasting previous evidence from individual research reports, we found evidence against higher rates of atypical handedness irrespective of handedness classification using frequentist and robust Bayesian meta-analyses. There was no evidence of publication bias across analyses. These results suggest that atypical handedness is not suited to serve as a biomarker for pedophilia.