Lee Tatia M C, Liu Ho-Ling, Hoosain Rumjahn, Liao Wan-Ting, Wu Chien-Te, Yuen Kenneth S L, Chan Chetwyn C H, Fox Peter T, Gao Jia-Hong
Neuropsychology Laboratory, Department of Psychology, The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam Road, Hong Kong, Hong Kong.
Neurosci Lett. 2002 Nov 15;333(1):13-6. doi: 10.1016/s0304-3940(02)00965-5.
To examine the effect of gender on the volume and pattern of brain activation during the viewing of alternating sets of faces depicting happy or sad expressions, 24 volunteers, 12 men and 12 women, participated in this functional magnetic resonance imaging study. The experimental stimuli were 12 photographs of Japanese adults selected from Matsumoto and Ekman's Pictures of Facial Affect. Four of these pictures depicted happy facial emotions, four sad, and four neutral. Half of the photographs were of men and the other half were of women. Consistent with previous findings, distinct sets of neural correlates for processing happy and sad facial emotions were noted. Furthermore, it was observed that male and female subjects used a rather different set of neural correlates when processing faces showing either happy or sad expressions. This was more noticeable when they were processing faces portraying sad emotions than happy emotions. Our findings provide some preliminary support for the speculation that the two genders may be associated with different areas of brain activation during emotion recognition of happy or sad facial expressions. This suggests that the generalizability of findings in regard to neural correlates of facial emotion recognition should consider the gender of the subjects.
为了研究在观看交替呈现的表达快乐或悲伤表情的面部图片时性别对大脑激活量及模式的影响，24名志愿者（12名男性和12名女性）参与了这项功能磁共振成像研究。实验刺激物是从松本和埃克曼的《面部表情图片集》中选出的12张日本成年人照片。其中4张照片描绘了快乐的面部情绪，4张悲伤的，4张中性的。一半照片是男性，另一半是女性。与先前的研究结果一致，观察到处理快乐和悲伤面部情绪时存在不同的神经关联组。此外，还观察到男性和女性受试者在处理显示快乐或悲伤表情的面部时使用了相当不同的神经关联组。当他们处理描绘悲伤情绪的面部时比处理快乐情绪的面部时这种情况更明显。我们的研究结果为以下推测提供了一些初步支持：在对快乐或悲伤面部表情进行情绪识别时，两种性别可能与不同的大脑激活区域相关联。这表明，关于面部情绪识别神经关联的研究结果的普遍性应考虑受试者的性别。
