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Behavioural results. Estimated marginal means for response accuracy (a) (corrected for individual differences in response latency), and (b) response latency (corrected for individual differences in response accuracy and AQ scores). Separate means are presented for the neutral (N), fearful (F) and happy (H) faces, error bars denote ±SEM. The results from the placebo (PBO) and oxytocin (OXT) sessions are presented in blue and red, respectively.
Source publication
Functional imaging and behavioural studies have shown that the neuropeptide oxytocin influences processing of emotional faces. However, it is not clear whether these effects reflect modulation at an early or late stage of affective processing. We investigated the effects of oxytocin administration on early and late visual evoked potentials (VEP) in...
Context in source publication
Context 1
... marginal means (EMMs) for behavioural accuracy (corrected for response latency) and latency (corrected for response accuracy and AQ scores) are presented in Figure 2a and 2b. The face stimuli had high intensity expressions and were presented for 500ms, so it is not surprising that performance was often either at ceiling level or close to ceiling level. ...
Citations
... Second, regarding sex differences in hormonal influences on social/emotional behavior, oxytocin has been demonstrated to modulate emotion processing [60][61][62]. Crucially, oxytocin reportedly facilitates early stages of emotional facial expression processing [63][64][65] but see [66], suggesting a relationship between oxytocin and the rapid detection of emotional facial expressions. Regarding sex differences in endogenous oxytocin, female participants reportedly have higher plasma oxytocin levels than male participants [67,68], which might explain the superior performance of processing emotional facial expressions in female participants, [10,11,13,14] given the relationship between oxytocin and emotion processing. ...
Background
Rapid detection of faces with emotional meaning is essential for understanding the emotions of others, possibly promoting successful interpersonal relationships. Although few studies have examined sex differences in the ability to detect emotional faces, it remains unclear whether faces with emotional meaning capture the attention of females and males differently, because emotional faces have visual saliency that modulates visual attention. To overcome this issue, we tested the rapid detection of the neutral faces associated with and without learned emotional value, which are all regarded as free from visual saliency. We examined sex differences in the rapid detection of the neutral female and male faces associated with emotional value.
Methods
First, young adult female and male participants completed an associative learning task in which neutral faces were associated with either monetary rewards, monetary punishments, or no monetary outcomes, such that the neutral faces acquired positive, negative, and no emotional value, respectively. Then, they engaged in a visual search task in which previously learned neutral faces were presented as discrepant faces among newly presented neutral distractor faces. During the visual search task, the participants were required to rapidly identify discrepant faces.
Results
Female and male participants exhibited comparable learning abilities. The visual search results demonstrated that female participants achieved rapid detection of neutral faces associated with emotional value irrespective of the sex of the faces presented, whereas male participants showed this ability only for male faces.
Conclusions
Our results demonstrated that sex differences in the ability to rapidly detect neutral faces with emotional value were modulated by the sex of those faces. The results suggest greater sensitivity to faces with emotional significance in females, which might enrich interpersonal communication, regardless of sex.
