Sex differences in social cognition: The case of face processing

Abstract

Several studies have demonstrated that women show a greater interest for social information and empathic attitude than men. This article reviews studies on sex differences in the brain, with particular reference to how males and females process faces and facial expressions, social interactions, pain of others, infant faces, faces in things (pareidolia phenomenon), opposite-sex faces, humans vs. landscapes, incongruent behavior, motor actions, biological motion, erotic pictures, and emotional information. Sex differences in oxytocin-based attachment response and emotional memory are also mentioned. In addition, we investigated how 400 different human faces were evaluated for arousal and valence dimensions by a group of healthy male and female University students. Stimuli were carefully balanced for sensory and perceptual characteristics, age, facial expression, and sex. As a whole, women judged all human faces as more positive and more arousing than men. Furthermore, they showed a preference for the faces of children and the elderly in the arousal evaluation. Regardless of face aesthetics, age, or facial expression, women rated human faces higher than men. The preference for opposite-vs. same-sex faces strongly interacted with facial age. Overall, both women and men exhibited differences in facial processing that could be interpreted in the light of evolutionary psychobiology. V C 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.Key words: gender differences; empathy; females; emotions; theory of mind; affective responseThe aim of the present project was to investigate the role of viewer sex in the emotional evaluation and psychological reactivity to human faces of various age, sex, and typology. According to an influential model (Osgood et al., 1957; Russell, 1979), dimensional and emotional reactions to stimuli and events can be characterized by two factors, the valence (pleasant-unpleasant, good-bad, positive-negative) and the intensity of the activation/ arousal (the physiological activation or the intensity of the inner emotional reaction: high-low). For this purpose Bradley and Lang (1994) have developed a nonverbal pictorial assessment technique that directly measures the pleasure, arousal, and dominance associated with a person's affective reaction to a wide variety of stimuli.In a neurometabolic study, Lane et al. (1999) have shown that differences in arousal and valence of visual IAPS (International Affective Picture System; Lang et al., 1988) stimuli, a large collection of color photographs, normatively rated for pleasure, arousal, and dominance) were associated with a differential activation of the extrastriate and the anterior temporal cortex (in terms of an enhancement for the more arousing and positive stimuli). Specifically, they scanned six male subjects with PET while they viewed emotional pictures and postscanning evaluated six types of picture sets (e.g., pleasant, unpleasant, neutral, arousing, not arousing, neutral) each consisting of 14 color pictures. Pleasant emotions relative to neutral were associated with ...

Sex differences in the neural underpinnings of social and monetary incentive processing during adolescence

“…However, our findings of a relative processing bias in males toward monetary outcomes at the expense of social outcomes is in line with a growing body of literature in adults showing attenuated interest and (neural) responses in men compared with women to a number of social stimuli, including facial expressions (for recent reviews, see Pavlova, 2017;Proverbio, 2017). For example, men have been reported to find facial expressions less arousing than do women (Proverbio, 2017), and their attention is less biased toward faces relative to women (Pavlova, Scheffler, & Sokolov, 2015), suggesting that these kinds of social stimuli are less salient for males. This lower salience might reflect a relatively reduced motivational significance of facial compared with monetary outcome signals when both are applied in the framework of the delayed incentive task.…”

Neural correlates of social exclusion across ages: A coordinate-based meta-analysis of functional MRI studies

“…While some studies attempted to control for gender by recruiting an even number of males and females, among studies with an uneven gender distribution all but one failed to include this variable as a covariate in their analyses. This represents a valuable avenue for future investigation, particularly considering that sex differences have been identified in a range of social cognitive processes (Pavlova, 2016; Proverbio, 2017). Meta-analyses of the effect of individual differences related to social sensitivity are another important area for future investigation, given that a meta-analysis focusing on the ACC found that self-reported distress was associated with the location of peak BOLD response within this region (Rotge et al, 2015).…”

Effects of the Video-feedback intervention to promote positive parenting and sensitive discipline on mothers’ neural responses to child faces: A randomized controlled ERP study including pre- and post-intervention measures

“…Similar to the ABC-intervention developed by Mary Dozier and the Infant Caregiver Lab (2006), the VIPP-SD aims at enhancing parental sensitive interactions with their children and at the same time stimulating consistent but gentle parental limit setting (Juffer, Bakermans-Kranenburg, & Van IJzendoorn, 2008, 2017. Ainsworth, Bell, and Stayton (1974) defined parental sensitivity as the ability to accurately perceive and interpret child signals and respond in a prompt and adequate way.…”