Sex differences in event-related potentials and attentional biases to emotional facial stimuli

Pfabigan, Daniela M.; Lamplmayr-Kragl, Elisabeth; Pintzinger, Nina M.; Sailer, Uta; Tran, Ulrich S.

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01477

Cited by 24 publications

(27 citation statements)

References 61 publications

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“…Moreover, women showed vigilance for happy faces, whereas men showed avoidance of happy faces. In another dot-probe study a gender difference was not found on the behavioral level, yet women expressed an enhanced P1 amplitude in response to the probe as compared to men, in particular for happy faces (Pfabigan, Lamplmayr-Kragl, Pintzinger, Sailer, & Tran, 2014).…”

Section: Subjectsmentioning

confidence: 84%

The dot-probe task to measure emotional attention: A suitable measure in comparative studies?

2017

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For social animals, attending to and recognizing the emotional expressions of other individuals is of crucial importance for their survival and likely has a deep evolutionary origin. Gaining insight into how emotional expressions evolved as adaptations over the course of evolution can be achieved by making direct cross-species comparisons. To that extent, experimental paradigms that are suitable for investigating emotional processing across species need to be developed and evaluated. The emotional dot-probe task, which measures attention allocation toward emotional stimuli, has this potential. The task is implicit, and subjects need minimal training to perform the task successfully. Findings in nonhuman primates, although scarce, show that they, like humans, have an attentional bias toward emotional stimuli. However, the wide literature on human studies has shown that different factors can have important moderating effects on the results. Due to the large heterogeneity of this literature, these moderating effects often remain unnoticed. We here review this literature and show that subject characteristics and differences in experimental designs affect the results of the dot-probe task. We conclude with specific recommendations regarding these issues that are particularly relevant to take into consideration when applying this paradigm to study animals.

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Section: Subjectsmentioning

confidence: 84%

The dot-probe task to measure emotional attention: A suitable measure in comparative studies?

2017

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“…While Tran et al [54] found no attentional bias for happy, angry and fearful facial expressions in a mixed sample using a subliminal face presentation time of 50 ms, Pfabigan et al [44] report a general attentional bias only in men for happy faces under face presentation times of 500 ms. Interestingly, Bar-Haim [55] suggest in a meta-analysis that threat-related stimuli in general do only lead to an attentional bias in clinical samples but not in non-anxious healthy controls. Here we support the idea that neither men nor women show an attentional cueing effect comparing happy to angry faces.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Thus, it might be that subconscious or very short cue presentation times have greater potential to elicit a strong attentional bias and thereby may be more prone to experimental interventions like AND exposure. In this study we decided for the commonly used face presentation time of 500 ms [22, 44, 58, 59] as also in our Stroop task we had opted for a conscious stimulus presentation time of 1000 ms. Taken together we ask to consider our null-results concerning AND-effects on visual cueing only preliminary and urge to include both shorter cue presentation times and eye-tracking in future studies.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We used a modified version of the original dot-probe task [20] similar to other studies [44, 45]. Emotional facial expressions of 14 different actors (seven women) from all age categories of the FACES database [46] were selected as stimuli.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Mean reaction times (RT) were first used to calculate the following frequently used attentional bias scores [22, 44]:…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The human body odor compound androstadienone leads to anger-dependent effects in an emotional Stroop but not dot-probe task using human faces

et al. 2017

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The androgen derivative androstadienone is a substance found in human sweat and thus is a putative human chemosignal. Androstadienone has been studied with respect to effects on mood states, attractiveness ratings, physiological and neural activation. With the current experiment, we aimed to explore in which way androstadienone affects attention to social cues (human faces). Moreover, we wanted to test whether effects depend on specific emotions, the participants' sex and individual sensitivity to smell androstadienone. To do so, we investigated 56 healthy individuals (thereof 29 females taking oral contraceptives) with two attention tasks on two consecutive days (once under androstadienone, once under placebo exposure in pseudorandomized order). With an emotional dot-probe task we measured visuo-spatial cueing while an emotional Stroop task allowed us to investigate interference control. Our results suggest that androstadienone acts in a sex, task and emotion-specific manner as a reduction in interference processes in the emotional Stroop task was only apparent for angry faces in men under androstadienone exposure. More specifically, men showed a smaller difference in reaction times for congruent compared to incongruent trials. At the same time also women were slightly affected by smelling androstadienone as they classified angry faces more often correctly under androstadienone. For the emotional dot-probe task no modulation by androstadienone was observed. Furthermore, in both attention paradigms individual sensitivity to androstadienone was neither correlated with reaction times nor error rates in men and women. To conclude, exposure to androstadienone seems to potentiate the relevance of angry faces in both men and women in connection with interference control, while processes of visuo-spatial cueing remain unaffected.

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Reduced spatial frequency differentiation and sex‐related specificities in fearful face detection in autism: Insights from EEG and the predictive brain model

Lacroix,

Harquel,

Barbosa

et al. 2024

Autism Research

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Face processing relies on predictive processes driven by low spatial frequencies (LSF) that convey coarse information prior to fine information conveyed by high spatial frequencies. However, autistic individuals might have atypical predictive processes, contributing to facial processing difficulties. This may be more normalized in autistic females, who often exhibit better socio‐communicational abilities than males. We hypothesized that autistic females would display a more typical coarse‐to‐fine processing for socio‐emotional stimuli compared to autistic males. To test this hypothesis, we asked adult participants (44 autistic, 51 non‐autistic) to detect fearful faces among neutral faces, filtered in two orders: from coarse‐to‐fine (CtF) and from fine‐to‐coarse (FtC). Results show lower d’ values and longer reaction times for fearful detection in autism compared to non‐autistic (NA) individuals, regardless of the filtering order. Both groups presented shorter P100 latency after CtF compared to FtC, and larger amplitude for N170 after FtC compared to CtF. However, autistic participants presented a reduced difference in source activity between CtF and FtC in the fusiform. There was also a more spatially spread activation pattern in autistic females compared to NA females. Finally, females had faster P100 and N170 latencies, as well as larger occipital activation for FtC sequences than males, irrespective of the group. Overall, the results do not suggest impaired predictive processes from LSF in autism despite behavioral differences in fear detection. However, they do indicate reduced brain modulation by spatial frequency in autism. In addition, the findings highlight sex differences that warrant consideration in understanding autistic females.

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Sex differences in event-related potentials and attentional biases to emotional facial stimuli

Cited by 24 publications

References 61 publications

The dot-probe task to measure emotional attention: A suitable measure in comparative studies?

The dot-probe task to measure emotional attention: A suitable measure in comparative studies?

The human body odor compound androstadienone leads to anger-dependent effects in an emotional Stroop but not dot-probe task using human faces

Reduced spatial frequency differentiation and sex‐related specificities in fearful face detection in autism: Insights from EEG and the predictive brain model

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