Background: Rapid detection of faces with emotional meaning is essential for understanding the emotions of others, possibly promoting successful interpersonal relationships. Although few studies have examined sex differences in the ability to detect emotional faces, it remains unclear whether faces with emotional meaning capture the attention of females and males differently, because emotional faces have visual saliency that modulates visual attention. To overcome this issue, we tested the rapid detection of the neutral faces associated with and without learned emotional value, which are all regarded as free from visual saliency. We examined sex differences in the rapid detection of the neutral female and male faces associated with emotional value.
Methods: First, young adult female and male participants completed an associative learning task in which neutral faces were associated with either monetary rewards, monetary punishments, or no monetary outcomes, such that the neutral faces acquired positive, negative, and no emotional value, respectively. Then, they engaged in a visual search task in which previously learned neutral faces were presented as discrepant faces among newly presented neutral distractor faces. During the visual search task, the participants were required to rapidly identify discrepant faces.
Results: Female and male participants exhibited comparable learning abilities. The visual search results demonstrated that female participants achieved rapid detection of neutral faces associated with emotional value irrespective of the sex of the faces presented, whereas male participants showed this ability only for male faces.
Conclusions: Our results demonstrated that sex differences in the ability to rapidly detect neutral faces with emotional value were modulated by the sex of those faces. The results suggest greater sensitivity to faces with emotional significance in females, which might enrich interpersonal communication, regardless of sex.
Keywords: Emotional value; Learning; Neutral faces; Sex differences; Visual search.
Speedy detection of faces with emotional meaning plays a fundamental role in social interactions. However, it is unclear whether females and males differ in their ability to rapidly detect neutral faces associated with newly acquired emotional meaning/value. This study examined the sex differences in the rapid detection of neutral female and male faces associated with emotional value subsequent to associative learning. During learning, neutral faces were paired with monetary reward or punishment, such that they acquired positive or negative emotional value, respectively. In a subsequent visual search task, previously learned neutral faces were presented as discrepant faces among newly presented neutral faces, and the participants had to rapidly identify the discrepant faces. The results showed that, among female participants, neutral faces associated with reward and punishment were detected more rapidly than neutral faces not associated with monetary outcomes, irrespective of the sex of the face stimuli. By contrast, male participants only showed the rapid detection of neutral male faces. The results suggest enhanced sensitivity to faces with emotional meaning among females, which is consistent with the notion of greater sensitivity to emotional/social information in females.
© 2023. The Author(s).