Acute Stress Eliminates Female Advantage in Detection of Ambiguous Negative Affect

Abstract

The human stress response evolved to maximize an individual's probability of survival when threatened. The present study addressed whether physical danger modulates perception of an unrelated ambiguous threat and, if so, to what extent this response is sexspecific. The authors utilized a first-time tandem skydive as a stressor, which had been previously validated as producing a highly-controlled, genuinely stressful environment. In a counter-balanced within-subjects design, participants wore a virtual reality helmet to complete an emotion-identification task during the plane's ascent (stress condition) and in the laboratory (control condition). Participants were presented static male faces morphed between 20-80% aggression, which gradually emerged from degraded images. Using a binary forced-choice design, participants identified each ambiguous face as aggressive or neutral. Results showed that participants characterized emotion more rapidly under stress versus control conditions. Unexpectedly, the results also show that while women were more sensitive to affect ambiguity than men under control conditions, they exhibited a marked decrease in sensitivity equivalent to men while under stress.

Babies in traffic: Infant vocalizations and listener sex modulate auditory motion perception.

“…Experiment 3 provides support for this hypothesis, but only "when the stakes are low" and the looming source has stopped a good distance away. The interaction of sex, vocalization, type, and distance is consistent with findings that show the female advantage in processing emotion can be significantly diminished under conditions of stress (DeDora et al, 2011).…”

“…However, the current findings, along with those of DeDora et al (2011), may provide an explanation for failures to find differential effects of sex in processing infant laughs versus cries in neuroimaging studies (e.g., Seifritz, et al, 2003). The noise and confining nature of neuroimaging scanners can make them particularly stressful environments.…”

The fine line between ‘brave’ and ‘reckless’: Amygdala reactivity and regulation predict recognition of risk

“…On the fifteen-minute plane ride leading up to the jump, subjects completed our Ambiguous Threat Detection Task, which we have previously shown to be responsive to stress (DeDora et al, 2011). The Ambiguous Threat Detection Task was designed to quantify the amount of signal/noise required for decision-making, dissociating perceptual and cognitive components.…”

How Psychological Stress Affects Emotional Prosody

“…Similarly, data reported by Herridge and colleagues [23] suggests that men who scored low on the Cook Medley Hostility scale and who were stressed through a cold pressor stressor perform slightly worse in recognizing emotional facial expressions than non-stressed participants. Stress does not only seem to influence facial emotion recognition accuracy , but it has also been reported that stressed participants respond more quickly when identifying emotions [24]. …”