Open Hemispheric Brain Dominance Scale

What this scale actually measures

The Open Hemispheric Brain Dominance Scale is a 20-statement self-report questionnaire. Each statement is rated from disagree to agree, and the answers are averaged into two style scores: one built from the analytic, orderly, fact-first statements and one built from the improvisational, creative, feeling-led statements.

In other words, it is a quick self-description of your working style. The name comes from the left-brain / right-brain framing that was popular when the scale was written, and that framing is the part you should treat with scepticism — see "What the scores cannot tell you" below.

How the items are scored

The 20 statements are not weighted equally. Nine statements feed the analytic ("left") score, seven feed the improvisational ("right") score, and four are not scored at all:

• Analytic score — statements 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 11, 12, 14 and 18 (mathematics, punctuality, order, words, planning, logic, calm).
• Improvisational score — statements 4, 6, 9, 13, 15, 17 and 19 (skipping instructions, randomness, new ideas, creative outlet, mess, romance, losing track of things).

Statements 1, 10, 16 and 20 are present in the original questionnaire but are not part of either score.

How the two scores are calculated

Each item is scored 1 to 5, and the two scores are the means of their own items, so each one runs from 1 to 5. Comparing the two means tells you which set of statements you endorsed more strongly; it does not tell you how strong the preference is in absolute terms.

Because the two item sets are different lengths (9 versus 7), the scale reports two averages rather than a single percentage — a total score would be weighted toward whichever set happens to have more items.

What the scores cannot tell you

The idea that each person is either "left-brained" (logical) or "right-brained" (creative) is a popular myth. The hemispheres do differ in some functions — language is usually lateralised to the left, and aspects of spatial attention to the right — but complex tasks such as reasoning, planning or making art engage both hemispheres, connected by the corpus callosum.

Large resting-state fMRI studies that looked for a "dominant hemisphere" pattern in individuals have not found one. So read your result as a description of how you like to work, in the same family as a learning-style or work-style preference. It is not a neurological finding, a measure of ability, or a diagnosis.

References

• Nielsen, J. A., Zielinski, B. A., Ferguson, M. A., Lainhart, J. E., & Anderson, J. S. (2013). An evaluation of the left-brain vs. right-brain hypothesis with resting state functional connectivity magnetic resonance imaging. PLOS ONE, 8(8), e71275.