Gender differences in regional cerebral activity during sadness

Abstract

Functional magnetic resonance imaging and echo-planar-imaging were used to investigate affect related gender differences in regional cerebral activity. The experiment was conducted using a standardized mood induction procedure. Blood-oxygen-level-dependent effect was measured in 13 male and 13 female healthy subjects, during both moods of happiness and sadness, respectively. Parallel to earlier neuroimaging findings, our results show brain activity in the amygdala of males during negative affect. Females failed to demonstrate a similar activation pattern despite matched subjective ratings of negative affect to males. Results point to differential regional cerebral correlates of emotional experience in males and females, which is suggestive of a more focal and subcortical processing of sadness in men.

A review on sex differences in processing emotional signals

“…Moreover, in male subjects, signal intensities in the right amygdala increased with intensified subjective experience of sadness. The same pattern was not confirmed for women and also not for the left amygdala (Schneider, Habel, Kessler, Salloum, & Posse, 2000). Men also showed more right amygdala activity following the passive observation of dynamic angry versus neutral faces which was not the case in women (Schneider et al, 2011).…”

“…Derntl et al (2009) observed that females and males showed equal bilateral amygdala activation following emotional faces but calculation of correlation coefficients for females and males separately revealed a significant association between recognition accuracy and amygdala activation to fearful faces only in the male group. Schneider et al (2000) reported a correlation between mood parameters and amygdala activation during sad mood induction only in the male subjects. While viewing fearful versus neutral facial expressions, male but not female observers showed attenuation of tonic arousal all across early to late phases of the experiment.…”

Evidence for modulation of facial emotional processing bias during emotional expression decoding by serotonergic and noradrenergic antidepressants: an event-related potential (ERP) study

“…Males were selected because whilst there are gender differences in emotional processing (e.g. Kemp et al 2004a;Orozco and Ehlers 1998;Schneider et al 2000), the use of females adds complexity due to menstrual cycle influences on emotional processing. Participants were recruited through university advertisements and were deemed suitable for participation following a semi-structured clinical interview based upon the following exclusion criteria: smokers, current or past history of psychiatric or neurological, history of substance abuse and if on any prescribed medication.…”

The neural correlates of sex differences in emotional reactivity and emotion regulation

“…However, to date, only a handful of studies have explicitly investigated the underlying neural circuitry of gender differences in the processing of emotional stimuli. Some of these studies showed that females are more susceptible to the influence of emotional prosody on semantic processing [Schirmer et al, 2004], while others reported attenuated amygdala responding to fear-inducing stimuli [Schienle et al, 2005], to a sadness-inducing procedure [Schneider et al, 2000], and to sexually arousing stimuli [Sabatinelli et al, 2004;Wrase et al, 2003] in women compared to men. Other investigations demonstrated that men and women mainly differ in the pattern of cortical activations during emotional processing, suggesting that men and women predominantly differ in terms of their cognitive strategies, with men evaluating affective stimuli based on the recall of past experiences [Lee et al 2002[Lee et al , 2005.…”