No abstract

Objective The Compensatory Prophylaxis Hypothesis proposes that women will show increased pathogen disgust at points in the menstrual cycle when progesterone is high, compensating for the immunosuppressive effects of progesterone. However, evidence for the Compensatory Prophylaxis Hypothesis from studies that used longitudinal designs to investigate whether pathogen disgust tracks changes in progesterone is mixed. It was recently proposed that longitudinal designs may be poorly suited to testing the Compensatory Prophylaxis Hypothesis because carry-over effects when women are tested repeatedly in within-subject designs might obscure the effects of progesterone and pathogen disgust. Consequently, we used a between-subjects design to test for a positive relationship between scores on the pathogen disgust subscale of the Three Domain Disgust Scale and progesterone levels imputed from menstrual cycle data using actuarial tables. Methods We employed a between-subject design on N = 1346 women using the Three Domains of Disgust Scale (TDDS). Results We found no evidence for a positive effect of progesterone on pathogen disgust, suggesting that null results for the hypothesized relationship between progesterone and pathogen disgust are not limited to studies using designs that may be subject to carry-over effects caused by repeated testing. Conclusion Our results add to a growing body of research that does not support the Compensatory Prophylaxis Hypothesis.

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The ability to recognize emotions – a crucial prerequisite for social interactions – varies among individuals. Sex differences have been proposed as a central source of individual differences, although the existing evidence is rather heterogeneous. In the current study (N = 426), we investigated potential moderating effects of stimulus features including modality, emotion specificity, and sex of encoder on the magnitude of sex differences in emotion recognition. Our findings replicated women’s overall better emotion recognition, particularly evident for negative expressions (fear and anger) compared to men. This outperformance was observable in all modalities, with the largest differences for audiovisually expressed emotions, while encoders’ sex had no impact. Given our findings, future studies should consider these and other potential moderator variables to better estimate sex differences.