Gender Judgments Research Articles

Neural Substrates of Social Emotion Regulation: A fMRI Study on Imitation and Expressive Suppression to Dynamic Facial Signals

Emotion regulation is crucial for successfully engaging in social interactions. Yet, little is known about the neural mechanisms controlling behavioral responses to emotional expressions perceived in the face of other people, which constitute a key element of interpersonal communication. Here, we investigated brain systems involved in social emotion perception and regulation, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in 20 healthy participants. The latter saw dynamic facial expressions of either happiness or sadness, and were asked to either imitate the expression or to suppress any expression on their own face (in addition to a gender judgment control task). fMRI results revealed higher activity in regions associated with emotion (e.g., the insula), motor function (e.g., motor cortex), and theory of mind (e.g., [pre]cuneus) during imitation. Activity in dorsal cingulate cortex was also increased during imitation, possibly reflecting greater action monitoring or conflict with own feeling states. In addition, premotor regions were more strongly activated during both imitation and suppression, suggesting a recruitment of motor control for both the production and inhibition of emotion expressions. Expressive suppression (eSUP) produced increases in dorsolateral and lateral prefrontal cortex typically related to cognitive control. These results suggest that voluntary imitation and eSUP modulate brain responses to emotional signals perceived from faces, by up- and down-regulating activity in distributed subcortical and cortical networks that are particularly involved in emotion, action monitoring, and cognitive control.

A Preliminary Study on the Use of Vocal Function Exercises to Improve Voice in Male-to-Female Transgender Clients

This study explores the outcomes of symptomatic voice treatment plus Stemple's vocal function exercises (VFEs) for a group of male-to-female (MTF) transgender (TG) clients seeking voice feminization. Both acoustic and perceptual outcomes were assessed, in addition to the clients' attitudes toward VFE. Prospective treatment study. Three MTF TG clients plus three control female speakers and three control male speakers served as subjects. All provided a variety of speech samples. The TG clients underwent symptomatic voice therapy for 6 weeks, while simultaneously performing the VFE protocol. At the end of therapy, the TG clients provided posttreatment voice samples. All voice samples were analyzed for speaking fundamental frequency (SFF), SFF upper and lower limits, and the first three formants of /i/. A CD of pre- and posttreatment voice samples plus the control voices was presented to listeners for gender judgments and masculinity and femininity ratings. For acoustic measures, the TG subjects appeared more similar to the male control speakers in the pretest, and more similar to the female controls in the posttest. Perceptually, listeners continued to identify the TG subjects as male following therapy, although they were rated as significantly less masculine and more feminine. TG subjects were generally positive about the addition of VFE to their therapy experience. The addition of VFE did not appear to improve posttreatment outcomes compared with previous literature. It was suggested that both number of sessions and experience living full-time as a woman might be important variables in predicting progress in therapy.

Approaching the good and avoiding the bad is more automatic for emotional words than for emotional faces

To approach or to avoid is a fundamental decision each cognitive agent has to make in their daily routines. Previous studies have showed that emotional valence of stimuli is bidirectionally linked to behavioral dispositions. Positive valence facilitates approaching and negative valence facilitates avoiding, meanwhile people tend to give more positive evaluations during approaching but more negative evaluations during avoiding. However, it is still controversial whether this link is automatic and independent of evaluation. In the present study we adopt the implicit association test (IAT) to explore the possible automatic link between behavioral tendencies and emotional valences. In experiment 1, participants were required to categorize happy faces versus disgusting faces, or approaching arrows versus avoiding arrows. They were able to categorize the items faster in the compatible condition (e.g., happy faces and approaching arrows were assigned to left hand while disgusting faces and avoiding arrows were assigned to right hand) compared with the incompatible condition (e.g., happy faces and avoiding arrows were assigned to left hand while disgusting faces and approaching arrows were assigned to right hand). In experiment 2, participants were still asked to categorize approaching arrows versus avoiding arrows, but to make gender judgments (male versus female) for the same faces used in experiment 1. The irrelevant emotional expressions turned out to have no effects on categorization. In experiments 3 and 4, emotional faces were replaced by emotional words and participants were demanded to categorize the valence of the word or whether the word describe a person or an object besides the arrow categorization. In both experiments, we found a strong link between approach/avoidance and positive/negative valence of the emotional words, regardless their task relevance. It seems that emotional words convey more strong cues for us to make approach/avoid decisions than emotional facial expressions. Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2012

An Examination of the Effects of Sport Involvement on Ethical Judgments in Sport and Business

Popular press headlines frequently reveal unethical or illegal activity in business and sports. Given these parallel ethical lapses in business and sport, our study examines potential relationships between student sport involvement (active and passive) and ethical judgments regarding issues in sport and business. Our results, based on a sample of 202 undergraduates in an upper-division management class, indicate a significant negative relationship between high passive sport involvement and ethical judgments about sport issues as well as a consistent significant positive relationship between female gender and ethical judgments about sport and business issues.

Task-Dependent Modulation of Effective Connectivity within the Default Mode Network.

The default mode network (DMN) has recently attracted widespread interest. Previous studies have found that task-related processing can induce deactivation and changes in the functional connectivity of this network. However, it remains unclear how tasks modulate the underlying effective connectivity within the DMN. Using recent advances in dynamic causal modeling (DCM), we investigated the modulatory effect of (gender judgment) task performance on directed connectivity within the DMN. Sixteen healthy subjects were scanned twice: at rest and while performing a gender judgment task. Group independent component analysis was used to identify independent spatial components. Four subject-specific regions of interest (ROIs) were defined according to the ensuing default mode component: the posterior cingulate cortex, the left lateral parietal cortex, the right lateral parietal cortex, and the medial prefrontal cortex. Effective connectivity among these regions was then characterized with stochastic DCM, revealing enhanced (extrinsic) between region connectivity within the DMN during task sessions – and a universal decrease in (intrinsic) self-inhibition – relative to resting sessions. These results suggest a distributed but systematic modulatory effect of cognitive and attentional set on the effective connectivity subtending the DMN: an effect that increases its sensitivity to inputs and may optimize distributed processing during task performance.

Temporal dynamics of trustworthiness perception

Behavioral and neuroimaging studies suggest that the attribution of trustworthiness to faces relies on emotional and structural cues. Attributions happen spontaneously and very rapidly but the precise temporal dynamics of the underlying processes are not known. We investigated the temporal dynamics of trustworthiness perception by employing scalp recorded event related potentials and evaluating effects on components previously implicated in face processing: P1 (positive component ~100ms post-stimulus), N170 (negative deflection sensitive to faces) and a posterior-occipital negativity~230 to 280ms (early posterior negativity—EPN). Participants judged the gender and trustworthiness of female and male images manipulated to look either more or less trustworthy. The results indicated that facilitated behavioral processing of socially important stimuli—in particular males that looked untrustworthy (and should be avoided) but also females that looked trustworthy (and who might therefore be useful in cooperative ventures)—was reflected in an increased negativity of N170 amplitude over the right hemisphere. Additionally, trustworthiness continued to modulate the amplitude of the negative deflection~230 to 280ms post-stimulus during explicit judgments of trustworthiness but not during gender judgments. The results suggest that negativity accompanies the relevance of the faces (female trustworthy and male untrustworthy) that are important to remember for future social interactions.

Lower effective connectivity between amygdala and parietal regions in response to fearful faces in schizophrenia

Behavioral abnormalities related to processing negative emotions such as fear have been demonstrated in schizophrenia. The amygdala is strongly associated with fear processing, and alterations in amygdala function and structure have been demonstrated in schizophrenia. Further, functional disconnectivity has been attributed as key to the etiology of schizophrenia, with a number of lines of evidence supporting this theory. In the present study, we examine the effective connectivity corresponding to fear processing, from the amygdala to the whole brain, and compare this between patients with schizophrenia and control participants. An implicit facial emotion processing task was performed by 19 patients with schizophrenia and 24 matched controls during fMRI scanning. During the task, participants made gender judgments from facial images with either neutral or fearful emotion. Neural response to fearful images versus neutral was used as contrast of interest to estimate effective connectivity between the amygdala and the whole brain using the psycho-physiological interactions approach. This connectivity was compared between patients with schizophrenia and healthy controls. We show that when looking at fearful compared to neutral faces patients with schizophrenia show significantly reduced effective connectivity from the amygdala to a large cluster of regions including parts of the precuneus and parietal lobe, compared to healthy controls. These regions have been associated with emotion processing and high level social cognition tasks involving self related processing and mental representations about other people. The reduced amygdala connectivity in schizophrenia shown here further illuminates the neural basis for the behavioral abnormalities in emotional and social function found in the disorder.

Understanding grapheme personification: A social synaesthesia?

Much of synaesthesia research focused on colour, but not all cross-domain correspondences reported by synaesthetes are strictly sensory. For example, some synaesthetes personify letters and numbers, in additional to visualizing them in colour. First reported in the 1890s, the phenomenon has been largely ignored by scientists for more than a century with the exception of a few single-case reports. In the present study, we collected detailed self-reports on grapheme personification using a questionnaire, providing us with a comprehensive description of the phenomenology of grapheme personification. Next, we documented the behavioural consequences of personifying graphemes using a congruity paradigm involving a gender judgement task; we also examined whether personification is associated with heightened empathy as measured using Empathy Quotient and found substantial individual differences within our sample. Lastly, we present the first neuroimaging case study of personification, indicating that the precuneus activation previously seen in other synaesthesia studies may be implicated in the process. We propose that frameworks for understanding synaesthesia could be extended into other domains of cognition and that grapheme personification shares more in common with normal cognition than may be readily apparent. This benign form of hyper-mentalizing may provide a unique point of view on one of the most central problems in human cognition - understanding others' state of mind.

Neurodevelopmental changes of reading the mind in the eyes

The eyes provide important information for decoding the mental states of others. In this fMRI study we examined how reading the mind in the eyes develops across adolescence and we tested the developmental trajectories of brain regions involved in this basic perceptual mind-reading ability. Participants from three age groups (early adolescents, mid adolescents and young adults) participated in the study and performed an adapted version of the 'Reading the Mind in the Eyes task', in which photographs of the eye region of faces were presented. Behavioral results show that the ability to decode the feelings and thoughts of others from the eyes develops before early adolescence. For all ages, brain activity was found in the posterior superior temporal sulcus during reading the mind in the eyes relative to a control condition requiring age and gender judgments using the same eyes stimuli. Only early adolescents showed additional involvement of the medial prefrontal cortex, the inferior frontal gyrus and the temporal pole. The results are discussed in the light of recent findings on the development of the social brain network.

The Impact of Ethical Orientation and Gender on Final Year Undergraduate Auditing Students' Ethical Judgments

This study considers the possibility of auditing students' ethical judgment being affected by two factors, namely ethical orientation and gender. While tests revealed that more idealistic students judged some unethical situations more strictly than did less idealistic students, overall no significant relationship was found between ethical orientation and ethical judgment. The study also reported no significant relationship between gender and ethical judgment. Furthermore, males were as likely as females to be classified as high idealists. Overall, the findings from the current study inform auditing educators that discriminating among students on the basis of ethical orientation and gender may not assist in stimulating students' discussion and resolution of ethical dilemmas.

Effects of the BDNF Val66Met polymorphism on neural responses to facial emotion

The brain derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) Val66Met polymorphism has been associated with affective disorders, but its role in emotion processing has not been fully established. Due to the clinically heterogeneous nature of these disorders, studying the effect of genetic variation in the BDNF gene on a common attribute such as fear processing may elucidate how the BDNF Val66Met polymorphism impacts brain function. Here we use functional magnetic resonance imaging examine the effect of the BDNF Val66Met genotype on neural activity for fear processing. Forty healthy participants performed an implicit fear task during scanning, where subjects made gender judgments from facial images with neutral or fearful emotion. Subjects were tested for facial emotion recognition post-scan. Functional connectivity was investigated using psycho-physiological interactions. Subjects were genotyped for the BDNF Val66Met polymorphism and the measures compared between genotype groups. Met carriers showed overactivation in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), brainstem and insula bilaterally for fear processing, along with reduced functional connectivity from the ACC to the left hippocampus, and impaired fear recognition ability. The results show that during fear processing, Met allele carriers show an increased neural response in regions previously implicated in mediating autonomic arousal. Further, the Met carriers show decreased functional connectivity with the hippocampus, which may reflect differential retrieval of emotional associations. Together, these effects show significant differences in the neural substrate for fear processing with genetic variation in BDNF.

Discrepant Integration Times for Upright and Inverted Faces

Judgments of upright faces tend to be more rapid than judgments of inverted faces. This is consistent with encoding at different rates via discrepant mechanisms, or via a common mechanism that is more sensitive to upright input. However, to the best of our knowledge no previous study of facial coding speed has tried to equate sensitivity across the characteristics under investigation (eg emotional expression, facial gender, or facial orientation). Consequently we cannot tell whether different decision speeds result from mechanisms that accrue information at different rates, or because facial images can differ in the amount of information they make available. To address this, we examined temporal integration times, the times across which information is accrued toward a perceptual decision. We examined facial gender and emotional expressions. We first identified image pairs that could be differentiated on 80% of trials with protracted presentations (1 s). We then presented these images at a range of brief durations to determine how rapidly performance plateaued, which is indicative of integration time. For upright faces gender was associated with a protracted integration relative to expression judgments. This difference was eliminated by inversion, with both gender and expression judgments associated with a common, rapid, integration time. Overall, our data suggest that upright facial gender and expression are encoded via distinct processes and that inversion does not just result in impaired sensitivity. Rather, inversion caused gender judgments, which had been associated with a protracted integration, to become associated with a more rapid process.

Tough and Tender

Emerging evidence has shown that human thought can be embodied within physical sensations and actions. Indeed, abstract concepts such as morality, time, and interpersonal warmth can be based on metaphors that are grounded in bodily experiences (e.g., physical temperature can signal interpersonal warmth). We hypothesized that social-category knowledge is similarly embodied, and we tested this hypothesis by examining a sensory metaphor related to categorical judgments of gender. We chose the dimension of “toughness” (ranging from tough to tender), which is often used to characterize differences between males and females. Across two studies, the proprioceptive experience of toughness (vs. tenderness) was manipulated as participants categorized sex-ambiguous faces as male or female. Two different manipulations of proprioceptive toughness predictably biased the categorization of faces toward “male.” These findings suggest that social-category knowledge is at least partially embodied.

Holistic processing underlies gender judgments of faces

In three experiments, we investigated whether holistic processing underlies gender judgments about faces. Chinese participants were asked to make gender judgments for inverted, scrambled, or composite faces. Results showed that judgments were dramatically impaired by these manipulations (as compared with performance for normal upright faces), demonstrating three hallmark effects of holistic face processing that have been observed in perception of face identity. Whether the test faces were Chinese or Caucasian showed no effect on holistic processing of gender perception, in contrast to studies of identity analysis. These results suggest that holistic processing is a general mechanism for different aspects of face perception and are consistent with the idea that physiognomic properties that determine the gender of a face are universal, rather than race specific.

An objective measure of the effect of adaptation on recognition of famous faces

Adaptation to faces has been shown to influence judgments of normality, emotion, gender, race, and identity of subsequently viewed faces (Webster et al 1999, 2004; Leopold et al 2001). The general method used is to adapt subjects to a face at one extreme of a continuum and measure people's subjective reports of the aftereffect on neutral or average faces. Here we use an objective recognition paradigm to show that adaptation can help or hinder subjects in identifying famous faces. 2 unknown faces were each morphed with 4 different famous faces (8 morphs total). Stimuli were grey-scale photographs of faces circumscribed by ovals which masked the ears and hairline. Subjects either adapted to one of the unknown faces or did not adapt to a face (baseline condition). Test faces from the morphs were presented in blocks with the amount of famous face present in the test faces increasing as the experiment progressed. At no time before or during the experiment were subjects told the identity of the famous faces used in the morphs. Results showed that if adaptation was to the unknown face used to make a morph, subjects needed less of a famous face to be present in the morph in order to identify it, relative to no adaptation. However, adaptation to a face not present in a morph made recognition worse than baseline. A replication using new stimuli and subjects produced similar results. Implications of the findings for models of face spaces and recognition are discussed.

A common neural system mediating two different forms of social judgement

A wide range of neuropsychiatric conditions, including schizophrenia and autistic spectrum disorder (ASD), are associated with impairments in social function. Previous studies have shown that individuals with schizophrenia and ASD have deficits in making a wide range of social judgements from faces, including decisions related to threat (such as judgements of approachability) and decisions not related to physical threat (such as judgements of intelligence). We have investigated healthy control participants to see whether there is a common neural system activated during such social decisions, on the basis that deficits in this system may contribute to the impairments seen in these disorders. We investigated the neural basis of social decision making during judgements of approachability and intelligence from faces in 24 healthy participants using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We used conjunction analysis to identify common brain regions activated during both tasks. Activation of the amygdala, medial prefrontal cortex, inferior prefrontal cortex and cerebellum was seen during performance of both social tasks, compared to simple gender judgements from the same stimuli. Task-specific activations were present in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in the intelligence task and in the inferior and middle temporal cortex in the approachability task. The present study identified a common network of brain regions activated during the performance of two different forms of social judgement from faces. Dysfunction of this network is likely to contribute to the broad-ranging deficits in social function seen in psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia and ASD.

The Politics of the Sensuous and the Sacred Body in India

Abstract This paper is written inspired by looking at the hypocritical neocolonial/postcolonial Indians who claim to be the moralistic proper Hindu Indians. The paper discusses contemporary Indian aesthetic creations, specifically visual images and plastic arts, and correlates them with the excessive psychological, ethical, social, and gender judgments in which they are placed. Nakedness and naked bodies, the sensuous and the sacred body are judged within different hermeneutical contexts. By nakedness I do not mean just the nude body or the sexed body/body-ness, but nakedness in all its ambivalence. The paper focuses on various events in India to show how the domain of the expressive lifeworld of the sensuous and the sacred is still a question of debate, which has not changed since the Victorian moral codes.

Opportunistic Face Encoding in the Brain: the Role of the Categorization Task

- Introduction: In this study we demonstrate that the uncertainty of a categorization task modulates the information that the observer encodes from the stimulus. We demonstrate this in the context of a face categorization task and show that task uncertainty causes a greater extraction of information. - Methods: Two observers completed 8000 trials of condition 1 (EXPECT) and 8000 trials of condition 2 (NOEXPECT). In the EXPECT condition, observers were aware of the categorization task to be performed (gender or expressiveness judgment) prior to presentation of the sparsely sampled face stimulus (see [1] for details of the stimuli). In the NOEXPECT condition this task information came afterwards (Figure 1). Concurrently we measured high density EEG, EOG and behavioural response. For each sensor and time point we computed a classification image representing the visual information underlying modulations in neuronal activity at that sensor and time point (for full details see [2]). We establish the feature sensitivity value for three visual features (the left eye, the right eye and the mouth, established as the critical information for gender and expressiveness tasks [1,2,3]) as the percentage overlap between each classification image and a feature reference template [2,3]. Projecting each feature sensitivity value as a component in an RGB color space (see Figure 2) allows for the visualization of the processing of both individual and combinations of multiple features within the brain. To measure the effects of expectation on information encoding we compute the feature sensitivity measure on all trials (collapsing GENDER and EXNEX categorizations) and compare the EXPECT and NOEXPECT conditions. To reduce the dimensionality of sensitivity data we sum the sensitivity measures across the EEG channels, resulting in a 1-dimensional temporally varying information measure for each feature in each condition. To compare information processing across EXPECT and NOEXPECT, we subtract the former from the latter to produce the curves shown in figures 2 and 3 (black curve represents the sum of all features). Their interpretation is simple: a positive value for a feature reveals that it is more encoded in the brain in the NOEXPECT condition; a negative value reveals that it is more encoded in the EXPECT condition. - Results: The above information measures are shown for two participants in Figures 2 and 3 for the time region from 140ms to 240ms after stimulus presentation. In each, the top row gives the RGB coding measure for the NOEXPECT condition, the bottom row gives the EXPECT condition and the middle row is RGB temporal information measure. For both participants, more significant visual information is encoded in the NOEXPECT condition than in the EXPECT condition. - Conclusions: The results obtained support our initial hypothesis that when the observer knows in advance the relevant task, they will adopt an opportunistic strategy extracting only the minimum information required from the stimulus. When task uncertainty is introduced the observer is forced to adopt a more generic strategy, and encode more visual information from the stimulus, maintaining potentially redundant information in memory until the task uncertainty is removed.

Gender bending: auditory cues affect visual judgements of gender in biological motion displays

The movement of an organism typically provides an observer with information in more than one sensory modality. The integration of information modalities reduces the likelihood that the observer will be confronted with a scene that is perceptually ambiguous. With that in mind, observers were presented with a series of point-light walkers each of which varied in the strength of the gender information they carried. Presenting those stimuli with auditory walking sequences containing ambiguous gender information had no effect on observers' ratings of visually perceived gender. When the visual stimuli were paired with auditory cues that were unambiguously female, observers' judgments of walker gender shifted such that ambiguous walkers were judged to look more female. To show that this is a perceptual rather than a cognitive effect, we induced visual gender after-effects with and without accompanying female auditory cues. The pairing of gender-neutral visual stimuli with unambiguous female auditory cues during adaptation elicited male after-effects. These data suggest that biological motion processing mechanisms can integrate auditory and visual cues to facilitate the extraction of higher-order features like gender. Possible neural substrates are discussed.

Neural correlates of the judgment of lying: A functional magnetic resonance imaging study

Lie judgment is an estimation of the speaker's intention to deceive inevitably accompanied by moral judgment. To depict their neural substrates, we conducted a functional magnetic resonance imaging study. Eighteen subjects read short stories and made judgments in three different tasks: a control gender judgment task, a moral judgment task, and a lie judgment task. Compared with the control task, both the moral and lie judgment tasks activated the left temporal lobe, the medial prefrontal cortex, the lateral orbitofrontal cortex extending to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the caudate nucleus, the left temporo-parietal junction (TPJ), and the right cerebellum. Neural activations were greater in the left middle frontal gyrus, the bilateral TPJ, and the right superior temporal sulcus in the lie judgment condition than in the moral judgment condition. In addition, the left TPJ showed greater activation when a protagonist told lies for anti-social rather than pro-social purposes. These data suggest that the judgment of lies is mediated by the neural substrates of moral judgment (conventionality) and those involved in detecting the intent to deceive (intentionality), and that the left TPJ might play a key role in processing both the conventional and the intentional information involved in the judgment of lying.