Women process multisensory emotion expressions more efficiently than men

Despite claims in the popular press, experiments investigating whether female are more efficient than male observers at processing expression of emotions produced inconsistent findings. In the present study, participants were asked to categorize fear and disgust expressions displayed auditorily, vis...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Neuropsychologia 2010-01, Vol.48 (1), p.220-225
Main Authors: Collignon, O., Girard, S., Gosselin, F., Saint-Amour, D., Lepore, F., Lassonde, M.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Acoustic Stimulation - methods
Adolescent
Adult
Affectivity. Emotion
Analysis of Variance
Auditory Perception - physiology
Bias
Biological and medical sciences
Differential and comparative psychology
Disgust
Emotion
Emotions - physiology
Facial
Facial Expression
Fear
Female
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Gender
Humans
Male
Multisensory
Nonlinear Dynamics
Pattern Recognition, Visual - physiology
Personality. Affectivity
Photic Stimulation - methods
Probability
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychophysiology
Reaction Time - physiology
Sex
Sex Factors
Vocal
Young Adult
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Summary:Despite claims in the popular press, experiments investigating whether female are more efficient than male observers at processing expression of emotions produced inconsistent findings. In the present study, participants were asked to categorize fear and disgust expressions displayed auditorily, visually, or audio-visually. Results revealed an advantage of women in all the conditions of stimulus presentation. We also observed more nonlinear probabilistic summation in the bimodal conditions in female than male observers, indicating greater neural integration of different sensory-emotional informations. These findings indicate robust differences between genders in the multisensory perception of emotion expression.
ISSN:0028-3932
1873-3514
DOI:10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2009.09.007