title: Perceiving an opponent's loss: gender-related differences in the medial-frontal negativity.
abstract: Along with expanding the understanding of the human 'social brain', a new challenge for neuroscience is to elucidate the nature of individual differences in social competence. Here we report a neural index of gender difference in empathy-related processing in a complex social situation. Using electroencephalography, we measured the neural activity of perceptions to one's own and another's monetary gain or loss, while individuals played a 'competitive' two-person gambling game, in which one's monetary gain resulted in the other's loss. The medial-frontal negativity (MFN), a component within 300 ms latency reflecting an emotional categorization of the event, showed a significant gender difference in perceiving an opponent's, but not a self-performed outcome. When females perceive the opponent's outcomes, the MFN was elicited, indicating that another's loss was categorized as negative, even though it resulted in a benefit to them. On the contrary, the males did not elicit discernable MFN to the opponent's outcomes. Together with the fact that the affect score has a negative linear correlation with the MFN, this indicated that the MFN was sensitive to socio-emotional processing. These results suggest that individual differences in complex social behavior result from rapid neural activity in response to external stimuli.
authors.affiliation: Department of General Systems Studies, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, The University of Tokyo, 3-8-1 Komaba, Meguro-ku, Tokyo 153-8902, Japan. khiraki@idea.c.u-tokyo.ac.jp
authors.forename: Hirokata
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Fukushima
authors.forename: Kazuo
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Hiraki
mesh_terms: D000339:Affect; D003163:Competitive Behavior; D005071:Evoked Potentials / Q000502:physiology; D005260:Female; D005625:Frontal Lobe / Q000502:physiology*; D005715:Gambling; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D012737:Sex Factors; D012938:Social Perception; D055815:Young Adult