Abstract: | We revisit the problem of testing for multivariate reflected symmetry about an unspecified point. Although this testing problem is invariant with respect to full-rank affine transformations, among the few hitherto proposed tests only a class of tests studied in Henze et al. (J Multivar Anal 87:275–297, 2003) that depends on a positive parameter a respects this property. We identify a measure of deviation \(\varDelta _a\) (say) from symmetry associated with the test statistic \(T_{n,a}\) (say), and we obtain the limit normal distribution of \(T_{n,a}\) as \(n \rightarrow \infty \) under a fixed alternative to symmetry. Since a consistent estimator of the variance of this limit normal distribution is available, we obtain an asymptotic confidence interval for \(\varDelta _a\). The test, when applied to a classical data set, strongly rejects the hypothesis of reflected symmetry, although other tests even do not object against the much stronger hypothesis of elliptical symmetry. |