Abstract
It is widely believed that females outperformed males in emotional information processing. The present study tested whether the female superiority in emotional information processing exists in a naturalistic social-emotional context, if so, what the temporal dynamics underlies. The behavioral and electrophysiological responses were recorded while participants were performing an interpersonal gambling game with opponents’ facial emotions given as feedback. The results yielded that emotional cues modulated the influence of monetary feedback on outcome valuation. Critically, this modulation was more conspicuous in females: opponents’ angry expressions increased females’ risky tendency and decreased the amplitude of reward positivity (RewP) and feedback P300. These findings indicate that females are more sensitive to emotional expressions in real interpersonal interactions, which is manifested in both early motivational salience detection and late conscious cognitive appraisal stages of feedback processing.
Highlights
To examine the female superiority of emotion decoding in a real social context, this study required participants to play an interpersonal gambling game with monetary and emotional cues orthogonally combined as feedback
Given that reward positivity (RewP)/feedback related negativity (FRN) is associated with early evaluation of performance feedback and action monitoring (Gehring and Willoughby, 2002; Holroyd et al, 2008; Ullsperger et al, 2014; Proudfit, 2015) while P300 reflected elaborated appraisal of the motivational significance of outcome (Yeung et al, 2004; Leng and Zhou, 2010; Li et al, 2010; Ulrich and Hewig, 2014; Mason et al, 2016; Zhao et al, 2016), the current findings suggested that interpersonal emotions might affect outcome processing during both early stage of motivational salience monitoring and late stage of cognitive appraisal processing
Given that angry expressions have been used as a negative social feedback (Vrticka et al, 2014; Ethridge et al, 2017; Oumeziane et al, 2017) and elicited smaller RewP (Ethridge et al, 2017) and feedback P300 (Oumeziane et al, 2017), the current findings suggested that females are highly susceptible to emotional feedback, and consquently modified the amplitude of RewP and P300
Summary
Females are believed to have superiority in emotional competence such as understanding other people’s emotions embedded in facial cues (Hall, 1978; Hall and Matsumoto, 2004; Kret and De Gelder, 2012; Sawada et al, 2014; Weisenbach et al, 2014), even among adolescents and infants (McClure, 2000; Lee et al, 2013) It remains unclear whether this advantage extends to real interpersonal interactions, as the participants in previous studies were required to recognize emotions from static images without a naturalistic social-emotional context (Hall, 1978; Filkowski et al, 2017). This female superiority in emotion decoding was observed at subliminal level
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