Gender Differences In Cerebral Activity During Emotion Perception Of Five Arousal Levels

Females are widely reported to be more susceptible to affective disturbances thanmales, including depression, phobia, dysthymia, panic disorder and so on. That femaleare susceptible to negative emotions has cross-cultural consistency. Existed studiesused event-related potentials to explore the neural mechanism(s) underlying thisphenomenon and found that the female’s advantage in emotion recognition may resultfrom the higher sensitivity of females to emotionally negative stimuli of lesservalence intensity compared to that of males. Another study reported self-referentialprocessing modulated emotion perception. So far the functional activity of females’susceptibility to negative emotion and the relationship between psychologicalbehavior performance and cerebral changes is still not clear. In the present study, weused event-related fMRI study to examine the differences of cerebral activity in malesand females in perception of emotional stimuli to explore the neuropsychologymechanism in gender differences of emotion perception.An event-related design BOLD functional magnetic resonance imaging paradigmwas employed to examine the differences in regions of activation in males andfemales in perception of stimuli of five valences (extreme negative, moderate negative,neutral, moderate positive and extreme positive). Subjects pressed buttons to judge thearousal level of stimuli pictures. One-sample t-test and the independent-sample t-testwere used to analyses the intragroup and intergroup effect, respectively. Correlationanalysis between personal distress subscale from the Interpersonal Reactivity Index(IRI) and the whole brain activity was also performed.Results are as bellow:(1). Female showed activation advantage in cortical midline structures (CMS)related to self-referential processing, brain regions contain mirror neuron, includingthe inferior parietal lobule, the premotor cortex and somatosensory areas like insulaunder the negative emotion inducing conditions.(2). Male showed activation advantage in the aforementioned areas underpositive emotion inducing conditions.(3). Personal distress subscale showed correlation with some of theaforementioned areas.The results indicated that female tended to experience the situation or experienceconveyed by stimuli related to themselves and constructed covert somatosensoryrepresentations, thus generated vicarious emotions. Activity of related brain regionsprovided evidence for this observation-perception consistency. This may explain thephenomenon that females are more susceptible to affective disturbances. Our findingssuggest possible gender-related neural substrates to emotional stimuli.