Schmuck Jonas, Voltz Emely, Gibbons Henning
Department of Psychology, University of Bonn, Kaiser-Karl-Ring 9, 53111 Bonn, Germany.
Brain Sci. 2024 Jul 24;14(8):739. doi: 10.3390/brainsci14080739.
Studies of social cognition have shown gender differences regarding human face processing. One interesting finding is the enhanced processing of opposite-gender faces at different time stages, as revealed by event-related brain potentials. Crucially, from an evolutionary perspective, such a bias might interact with the emotional expression of the face. To investigate this, 100 participants (50 female, 50 male) completed an expression-detection task while their EEG was recorded. In three blocks, fearful, happy and neutral faces (female and male) were randomly presented, with participants instructed to respond to only one predefined target expression level in each block. Using linear mixed models, we observed both faster reaction times as well as larger P1 and late positive potential (LPP) amplitudes for women compared to men, supporting a generally greater female interest in faces. Highly interestingly, the analysis revealed an opposite-gender bias at P1 for happy target faces. This suggests that participants' attentional templates may include more opposite-gender facial features when selectively attending to happy faces. While N170 was influenced by neither the face nor the participant gender, LPP was modulated by the face gender and specific combinations of the target status, face gender and expression, which is interpreted in the context of gender-emotion stereotypes. Future research should further investigate this expression and attention dependency of early opposite-gender biases.
社会认知研究表明，在人脸处理方面存在性别差异。一个有趣的发现是，事件相关脑电位显示，在不同时间阶段，对异性面孔的处理能力有所增强。至关重要的是，从进化的角度来看，这种偏差可能会与面部的情感表达相互作用。为了对此进行研究，100名参与者（50名女性，50名男性）在记录脑电图的同时完成了一项表情检测任务。在三个组块中，随机呈现恐惧、快乐和中性表情的面孔（包括女性和男性），要求参与者在每个组块中仅对一个预先定义的目标表情水平做出反应。使用线性混合模型，我们观察到与男性相比，女性的反应时间更快，P1波和晚期正电位（LPP）波幅更大，这支持了女性对面孔普遍更感兴趣的观点。非常有趣的是，分析显示在P1波处，对于快乐目标面孔存在异性偏差。这表明，当选择性地关注快乐面孔时，参与者的注意力模板可能包括更多异性面部特征。虽然N170不受面孔或参与者性别的影响，但LPP受面孔性别以及目标状态、面孔性别和表情的特定组合的调节，这在性别-情感刻板印象的背景下进行了解释。未来的研究应进一步探讨早期异性偏差的这种表情和注意力依赖性。
