title: Do you see what I see? Sex differences in the discrimination of facial emotions during adolescence.
abstract: During adolescence social relationships become increasingly important. Establishing and maintaining these relationships requires understanding of emotional stimuli, such as facial emotions. A failure to adequately interpret emotional facial expressions has previously been associated with various mental disorders that emerge during adolescence. The current study examined sex differences in emotional face processing during adolescence. Participants were adolescents (n = 1951) with a target age of 14, who completed a forced-choice emotion discrimination task. The stimuli used comprised morphed faces that contained a blend of two emotions in varying intensities (11 stimuli per set of emotions). Adolescent girls showed faster and more sensitive perception of facial emotions than boys. However, both adolescent boys and girls were most sensitive to variations in emotion intensity in faces combining happiness and sadness, and least sensitive to changes in faces comprising fear and anger. Furthermore, both sexes overidentified happiness and anger. However, the overidentification of happiness was stronger in boys. These findings were not influenced by individual differences in the level of pubertal maturation. These results indicate that male and female adolescents differ in their ability to identify emotions in morphed faces containing emotional blends. The findings provide information for clinical studies examining whether sex differences in emotional processing are related to sex differences in the prevalence of psychiatric disorders within this age group.
authors.affiliation: Faculty of Psychology and Education.
authors.forename: Nikki C
authors.initials: NC
authors.lastname: Lee
authors.forename: Lydia
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Krabbendam
authors.forename: Thomas P
authors.initials: TP
authors.lastname: White
authors.forename: Martijn
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Meeter
authors.forename: Tobias
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Banaschewski
authors.forename: Gareth J
authors.initials: GJ
authors.lastname: Barker
authors.forename: Arun L W
authors.initials: AL
authors.lastname: Bokde
authors.forename: Christian
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Büchel
authors.forename: Patricia
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Conrod
authors.forename: Herta
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Flor
authors.forename: Vincent
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Frouin
authors.forename: Andreas
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Heinz
authors.forename: Hugh
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Garavan
authors.forename: Penny
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Gowland
authors.forename: Bernd
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Ittermann
authors.forename: Karl
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Mann
authors.forename: Marie-Laure
authors.initials: ML
authors.lastname: Paillère Martinot
authors.forename: Frauke
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Nees
authors.forename: Tomas
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Paus
authors.forename: Zdenka
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Pausova
authors.forename: Marcella
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Rietschel
authors.forename: Trevor
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Robbins
authors.forename: Mira
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Fauth-Bühler
authors.forename: Michael N
authors.initials: MN
authors.lastname: Smolka
authors.forename: Juergen
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Gallinat
authors.forename: Gunther
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Schumann
authors.forename: Sukhi S
authors.initials: SS
authors.lastname: Shergill
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000786:Anger; D004192:Discrimination, Psychological / Q000502:physiology*; D056348:Emotional Intelligence; D004644:Emotions; D005145:Face; D005149:Facial Expression; D005239:Fear; D005260:Female; D006240:Happiness; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology; D011627:Puberty; D012727:Sex Characteristics