Abstract
Social interaction is critical to emotional well-being. Previous studies have suggested sex differences in the perception of social interaction. However, the findings depend on the nature of interactions and whether it involves facial emotions. Here, we explored sex differences in neural responses to the perception of social interaction using the Human Connectome Project data. Participants (n = 969, 505 women) were engaged in a social cognition task with geometric objects moving and colliding to simulate social interaction. Behaviorally, men relative to women demonstrated higher accuracy in perceiving social vs. random interactions. Men vs. women showed higher activation in the right superior temporal gyrus, bilateral occipital and posterior cingulate cortex and precuneus, and women vs. men showed higher activation in the right inferior frontal cortex, during exposure to social vs. random interactions. In whole-brain regressions, the differences in accuracy rate in identifying social vs. random interactions (ARSOC – ARRAN) were associated with higher activation in the paracentral lobule (PCL) and lower activation in bilateral anterior insula (AI), pre-supplementary motor area (preSMA), and left middle frontal gyrus (MFG) in men and women combined, lower activation in bilateral AI, preSMA and left MFG in men alone, and higher activation in the PCL and the medial orbitofrontal cortex in women alone. The latter sex differences were confirmed by slope tests. Further, the PCL activity mediated the correlation between an internalizing syndromal score, as assessed by the Achenbach Self-Report, and (ARSOC – ARRAN) across all subjects. These findings highlighted sex differences in the behavioral and neural processes underlying the perception of social interaction, as well as the influence of internalizing traits on these processes.
Highlights
Women were better at recognizing emotions and express themselves more men showed greater responses to threatening social cues (Kret and De Gelder, 2012). These findings suggest that sex differences in the perception of social interaction may vary according to the nature of social stimuli
We showed that exposure to interacting vs. random stimuli engaged a wide array of cortical and subcortical structures, with activity of the paracentral lobule (PCL) in positive correlation, and activity of bilateral anterior insula (AI) and anterior pre-supplementary motor area (preSMA), and left middle frontal gyrus (MFG) in negative correlation, with the accuracy in identifying interacting vs. random stimuli
We showed that, in men and women combined, PCL activity mediated the relationship between internalizing traits and ARSOC – ARRAN, suggesting that individuals who were socially avoidant and anxiety-prone were more accurate in identifying social vs. random stimuli and this correlation was supported by the somatosensory cortex
Summary
Sex Differences in the Perception of Social InteractionPerception of social interaction is central to “theory of mind” processing and inter-personal engagements. Sex Differences in the Perception of Social Interaction. Sex differences in the perception of verbal (Lee et al, 2017) or non-verbal (Hall, 1978; Rasmussen and Jiang, 2019) social interaction may reflect a consequence of evolutionary pressures on reproduction and survival (Buss, 1995; Wood and Eagly, 2002). As the primary caretakers of the offspring, females relative to males exhibited superiority in perceiving social interactions, conferring an advantage in recognizing and responding to infants’ needs (Babchuk et al, 1985; Maestripieri and Pelka, 2002; Simpson et al, 2016). In macaque monkeys, female relative to male infants looked more frequently at conspecifics’ faces at 2–3 weeks, and exhibited more affiliative behaviors, including gesturing and looking at human caretakers, at 4– 5 weeks (Simpson et al, 2016)
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