Hostility- and gender-related differences in oscillatory responses to emotional facial expressions.
Hostility is associated with biases in the perception of emotional facial expressions, such that ambiguous or neutral expressions tend to be perceived as threatening or angry. In this study, the effects of hostility and gender on the perception of angry, neutral, and happy faces and on the oscillatory dynamics of cortical responses elicited by these presentations were investigated using time-frequency decomposition by means of wavelet transforms. Feelings of hostility predisposed subjects to perceive happy and neutral faces as less friendly. This effect was more pronounced in women. In hostile subjects, presentation of emotional facial expressions also evoked stronger posterior synchronization in the theta and diminished desynchronization in the alpha band. This may signify a prevalence of emotional responding over cognitive processing. These effects were also more pronounced in females. Hostile females, but not hostile males, additionally showed a widespread synchronization in the alpha band. This synchronization is tentatively explained as a manifestation of inhibitory control which is present in aggressive females, but not in aggressive males.
Knyazev
Gennady G
GG
State Research Institute of Physiology, Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences, Novosibirsk 630117, Russia. knyazev@physiol.ru
Bocharov
Andrey V
AV
Slobodskoj-Plusnin
Jaroslav Yu
JY
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000374:Aggression / Q000502:physiology / Q000523:psychology*; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D004569:Electroencephalography; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology*; D005071:Evoked Potentials / Q000502:physiology; D005149:Facial Expression; D005260:Female; D006791:Hostility; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009991:Oscillometry; D010551:Personality / Q000502:physiology; D012016:Reference Values; D012737:Sex Factors; D012938:Social Perception; D055815:Young Adult