Gender Judgments Research Articles

Research on facial feature-based gender intelligent recognition based on the Adaboost algorithm

In order to overcome the problem of poor facial recognition intelligence and weak gender judgment, a new method based on Adaboost algorithm for facial feature-based gender intelligence recognition is proposed in this paper. In this method, the three-dimensional special point detection, weak perspective projection, spatial region segmentation and other methods are employed to construct the facial feature information sampling model. The Adaboost algorithm is used to analyse the matching between facial features and gender, on which facial-feature gender intelligent recognition is performed according to the distribution of the eyes, nose and mouth of the face image, and the edge contour detection model of the face image is constructed. The experimental results show that the method has the advantages of good intelligence, high recognition precision and short time cost in face-based gender recognition.

Attention is prioritised for proximate and approaching fearful faces

Attention is an important function that allows us to selectively enhance the processing of relevant stimuli in our environment. Fittingly, a number of studies have revealed that potentially threatening/fearful stimuli capture attention more efficiently. Interestingly, in separate fMRI studies, threatening stimuli situated close to viewers were found to enhance brain activity in fear-relevant areas more than stimuli that were further away. Despite these observations, few studies have examined the effect of personal distance on attentional capture by emotional stimuli. Using electroencephalography (EEG), the current investigation addressed this question by investigating attentional capture of emotional faces that were either looming/receding, or were situated at different distances from the viewer. In Experiment 1, participants carried out an incidental task while looming or receding fearful and neutral faces were presented bilaterally. A significant lateralised N170 and N2pc were found for a looming upright fearful face, however no significant components were found for a looming upright neutral face or inverted fearful and neutral faces. In Experiment 2, participants made gender judgements of emotional faces that appeared on a screen situated within or beyond peripersonal space (respectively 50 cm or 120 cm). Although response times did not differ, significantly more errors were made when faces appeared in near as opposed to far space. Importantly, ERPs revealed a significant N2pc for fearful faces presented in peripersonal distance, compared to the far distance. Our findings show that personal distance markedly affects neural responses to emotional stimuli, with increased attention towards fearful upright faces that appear in close distance.

Altered neuronal habituation to hearing others\u2019 pain in adults with autistic traits

This study tested the hypothesis that autistic traits influence the neuronal habituation that underlies the processing of others’ pain. Based on their autism-spectrum quotient (AQ), two groups of participants were classified according to their autistic traits: High-AQ and Low-AQ groups. Their event-related potentials in response to trains of three identical audio recordings, exhibiting either painful or neutral feelings of others, were compared during three experimental tasks. (1) In a Pain Judgment Task, participants were instructed to focus on pain-related cues in the presented audio recordings. (2) In a Gender Judgment Task, participants were instructed to focus on non-pain-related cues in the presented audio recordings. (3) In a Passive Listening Task, participants were instructed to passively listen. In the High-AQ group, an altered empathic pattern of habituation, indexed by frontal-central P2 responses of the second repeated painful audio recordings, was found during the Passive Listening Task. Nevertheless, both High-AQ and Low-AQ groups exhibited similar patterns of habituation to hearing others’ voices, both neutral and painful, in the Pain Judgment and Gender Judgment Tasks. These results suggest altered empathic neuronal habituation in the passive processing of others’ vocal pain by individuals with autistic traits.

Motion and Gender-Typing Features Interact in the Perception of Human Bodies.

The human body conveys socially relevant information, including a person’s gender. Several studies have shown that both shape and motion inform gender judgments of bodies. However, while body shape seems to influence more the judgment of female bodies, body motion seems to play a major role in the judgments of male bodies. Yet, the interdependence of morphologic and dynamic cues in shaping gender judgment and attractiveness evaluation in body perception is still unclear. In two experiments, we investigated how variations of implied motion and shape interact in perceptual and affective judgments of female and male bodies. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to provide ratings for masculinity and femininity of virtual renderings of human bodies with variable gender-typing features and implied motion. We found evidence of a tendency to perceive bodies in static poses as more feminine and bodies in dynamic poses as more masculine. In Experiment 2, participants rated the same pictures for dynamism and pleasantness. We found that male bodies were judged more dynamic than female bodies with the same pose. Also, female bodies were liked more in static than in dynamic poses. A mediation analysis allowed us to further shed light on the relationship between gender-typing features and motion, suggesting that the less is the movement conveyed by a female body, the greater is an observer’s sensitivity to its femininity, and this leads to a more positive evaluation of its pleasantness. Our findings hint to an association between stillness and femininity in body perception, which can stem from either the evolutionary meaning of sexual selection and/or the influence of cultural norms.

Listener Age and Gender Diversity: Effects on Voice-based Perception of Gender

An important clinical outcome of voice masculinization treatments in transmasculine speakers is voice-based perception of gender. Rigorous assessments of voice treatment that utilize ratings of perception of gender typically do not control for demographic characteristics of the listeners. The objective of the present study was to determine the effect of listeners' age and gender diversity on voice-based judgments of speaker gender. Speech stimuli were produced by a single transmasculine individual over approximately one year of hormone replacement therapy, during which he experienced significant changes in his voice. Three groups of listeners rated speech stimuli on a visual analog scale with anchors ranging from "definitely male" to "guessing male" to "guessing female" to "definitely female." Listener groups were N=10 cisgender young adults, N=10 cisgender older adults, and N=10 gender diverse individuals. All groups rated the speaker as consistently female through week 14 of hormone replacement therapy and consistently male after week 28. Mean responses of the three groups of listeners were highly correlated (Pearson's correlations all r > 0.97). Given reasonable group sizes, average ratings of gender perception of a transmasculine speaker are not highly influenced by varying listener age and gender minority status.

Stimulus arousal drives amygdalar responses to emotional expressions across sensory modalities

The factors that drive amygdalar responses to emotionally significant stimuli are still a matter of debate – particularly the proneness of the amygdala to respond to negatively-valenced stimuli has been discussed controversially. Furthermore, it is uncertain whether the amygdala responds in a modality-general fashion or whether modality-specific idiosyncrasies exist. Therefore, the present functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study systematically investigated amygdalar responding to stimulus valence and arousal of emotional expressions across visual and auditory modalities. During scanning, participants performed a gender judgment task while prosodic and facial emotional expressions were presented. The stimuli varied in stimulus valence and arousal by including neutral, happy and angry expressions of high and low emotional intensity. Results demonstrate amygdalar activation as a function of stimulus arousal and accordingly associated emotional intensity regardless of stimulus valence. Furthermore, arousal-driven amygdalar responding did not depend on the visual and auditory modalities of emotional expressions. Thus, the current results are consistent with the notion that the amygdala codes general stimulus relevance across visual and auditory modalities irrespective of valence. In addition, whole brain analyses revealed that effects in visual and auditory areas were driven mainly by high intense emotional facial and vocal stimuli, respectively, suggesting modality-specific representations of emotional expressions in auditory and visual cortices.

Influence of Attention Control on Implicit and Explicit Emotion Processing of Face and Body: Evidence From Flanker and Same-or-Different Paradigms.

Many existing findings indicate that processing of emotional information is pre-attentive, largely immune from attentional control. Nevertheless, inconsistent evidence on the interference of emotional cues on cognitive processing suggests that this influence may be a highly conditional phenomenon. The aim of the present study was twofold: (1) to examine the modulation of attention control on emotion processing using facial expressions (2) explore the very same effect for emotional body expressions. In Experiment 1, participants performed a Flanker task in which they had to indicate either the emotion (happy/fearful) or the gender of the target stimulus while ignoring the distracting stimuli at the side. We found evidence for intrusion of the emotional dimension of a stimulus in both the emotion and gender discrimination performance, thus when either task-relevant or task-irrelevant. To further explore the influence of attention control mechanisms, in Experiment 2 participants performed a same-or-different judgment task in which they were asked to pay attention to both the central and lateral stimuli and indicated whether the central stimulus matched the lateral for emotion or gender. Results showed that emotional features exerted an influence at an implicit level (i.e., during gender judgments) for bodies only. Gender features did not affect emotional processing in either experiments. To rule out the possibility that this effect was driven by postural rather than emotional features of fearful vs. happy stimuli, a control experiment was conducted. In Experiment 3, bodies with an opening/up-ward or closing/down-ward posture but with no emotional valence were presented. Results revealed that the body posture did not influence gender discrimination. Findings suggest that the emotional valence of a face or body stimulus can overpass attention filtering mechanisms, independently from the level of attentional modulation (Experiment 1). However, broadening the focus of attention to include the lateral stimuli led emotional information to intrude on the main task, exerting an implicit, bottom–up influence on gender processing, only when conveyed by bodies (Experiment 2). Results point to different mechanisms for the implicit processing of face and body emotional expressions, with the latter likely having role on action preparation processes.

Face Image Age Estimation Based on Data Augmentation and Lightweight Convolutional Neural Network

Face images contain many important biological characteristics. The research directions of face images mainly include face age estimation, gender judgment, and facial expression recognition. Taking face age estimation as an example, the estimation of face age images through algorithms can be widely used in the fields of biometrics, intelligent monitoring, human-computer interaction, and personalized services. With the rapid development of computer technology, the processing speed of electronic devices has greatly increased, and the storage capacity has been greatly increased, allowing deep learning to dominate the field of artificial intelligence. Traditional age estimation methods first design features manually, then extract features, and perform age estimation. Convolutional neural networks (CNN) in deep learning have incomparable advantages in processing image features. Practice has proven that the accuracy of using convolutional neural networks to estimate the age of face images is far superior to traditional methods. However, as neural networks are designed to be deeper, and networks are becoming larger and more complex, this makes it difficult to deploy models on mobile terminals. Based on a lightweight convolutional neural network, an improved ShuffleNetV2 network based on the mixed attention mechanism (MA-SFV2: Mixed Attention-ShuffleNetV2) is proposed in this paper by transforming the output layer, merging classification and regression age estimation methods, and highlighting important features by preprocessing images and data augmentation methods. The influence of noise vectors such as the environmental information unrelated to faces in the image is reduced, so that the final age estimation accuracy can be comparable to the state-of-the-art.

Top-down attention modulation on the perception of others’ vocal pain: An event-related potential study

Pain is typically expressed through various sensory (e.g., visual and auditory) modalities: the human voice conveys information about social and affective communication. While the empathic responses to others' pain in the visual modality are modulated by top-down attention constraints, it remains unclear whether empathy for such expressions in the auditory modality also involves such top-down modulation mechanisms. Therefore, the present study investigates how neural correlates of empathic processes to others' vocal pain are modulated by the task-instructed attention manipulations. Each participant completed the following three tasks: (1) Pain Judgment Task, in which participants were instructed to pay attention to pain cues in vocal stimuli, (2) Gender Judgment Task, in which participants were instructed to pay attention to non-pain cues in vocal stimuli; (3) Passive Listening Task, a control task in which participants were instructed to passively listen to the vocal stimuli without any required response. The earlier frontal-central N1 response to either others' painful or neutral voice was greater in the Pain Judgment Task than in the other two tasks, suggesting a general attention modulation on the bottom-up sensory processing of vocal stimuli. The frontal-central P2 responses to others' painful voices was greater in the Pain Judgment Task than in the other two tasks, but not to others' neutral voices, thus suggesting selective attention modulation on the P2 response to others' pain. Late positive complex (LPC) to others' painful and neutral voices differed significantly regardless of task manipulations, thus suggesting empathic pain modulation on LPC response. All these results demonstrated top-down attention modulation on affective sharing responses others' vocal pain, but not on cognitive appraisal process of others’ vocal pain.

The sound of gender: inferring the gender of names in a foreign language

Much research on sound symbolism has shown that some aspects of word meaning are linked to phonology. For instance, people tend perceive a name as a female one if it is longer, has stress on a later syllable, or ends with a vowel rather than a consonant. It is yet unclear whether people also use sound-symbolic cues to infer name gender from phonology in a language they do not speak. In three experiments, native speakers of English and German listened to real personal names in Min, a south China language that our participants had not been exposed to, and rated to what extent a name sounded male/female. Compared to real female names, real male names were rated more male-sounding by both English and German speakers in a consistent way. Further exploratory analysis showed that male names in Min, compared to female names, are more likely to have consonant-ending syllables and English- and German-speaking participants happened to make use of this sound-symbolic cue in gender judgement. These results show that people are able to make use of sound-symbolic cues to infer the gender of personal names even in a language they do not speak.

Bidirectional effects of priming in speech perception: Social-to-lexical and lexical-to-social

Previous perceptual research demonstrates that providing listeners with a social prime, such as information about a speaker's gender, can affect how listeners categorize an ambiguous speech sound produced by that speaker. We report the results of an experiment testing whether, in turn, providing listeners with a linguistic prime, such as which word they are about to hear, affects categorization of that speaker's gender. In an eye-tracking study testing for these bidirectional effects, participants (i) saw a visual prime (gender or lexical), (ii) heard an auditory stimulus drawn from a matrix of gender (female-to-male) and sibilant frequency (shack-to-sack) continua, and (iii) looked to images of the non-primed category. Social prime results replicate earlier findings that listeners’ /s-ʃ/ boundary can shift via visual gender information. Additionally, lexical prime results indicate that listeners’ judgments of speaker gender can shift with visual linguistic information. These effects are strongest for listeners at category boundaries where linguistic and social information are least prototypical. In regions of high linguistic and social prototypicality, priming effects are weakened or reversed. The results provide evidence of a bidirectional link between social and linguistic categorization in speech perception and its modulation by the stimulus prototypicality.

Similar and distinct neural mechanisms of visual and auditory emotion perception

Emotion is a rapidly changing psychological and physical phenomenon. In daily life, people need to use the information of various sensory modalities (visual, auditory, etc.) to perceive non-verbal emotional information. Non-verbal emotion from faces and voices are often complex and varied. Previous studies have revealed that there are common and distinct neural networks underlying perception of human faces and voices. However, the neural mechanisms underlying visual and auditory emotional perception have not been well studied. Furthermore, despite researches on audiovisual integration of cross-modal emotional information, the multisensory cortex of the visual and auditory emotional information remains elusive. Therefore, it is necessary to study the similarities and differences between the neural mechanisms of emotion perception in visual and auditory modalities, and to explore the multiple sensory cortex of cross-modal emotion perception. The present fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) study adopted a 2*3 (stimulus presentation modality: Visual, auditory; emotional valence: Happy, sad, fear) event-related design to investigate the neural mechanisms of emotion perception in visual and auditory modalities. When the stimulus (an emotional face or voice) was visually or aurally presented, participants were required to make a gender judgement. The results showed that the activation intensity of emotional faces in V1−V4, bilateral fusiform gyrus and bilateral superior temporal sulcus (STS) was significantly higher than that of emotional voices. Conversely, the activation intensity of emotional voices in auditory cortex (AC) was significantly higher than that of emotional faces. The results from multivoxel pattern analysis (MVPA) showed that the activation patterns of the right STS could discriminate the perception of human faces with emotional valence (happy, sad and fear face), indicating that the rSTG plays important role in perception of faces with different emotional valence; the activation patterns of the right FFA were different for happy and sad faces, indicating that the rFFA is crucial for positive and negative emotional face perception. A voxel-based whole brain analysis was further performed to examine the cortical areas that modulated perception of emotional valence. The whole brain analysis showed that the main effects for emotional valence was significant in the left opercular part of inferior frontal gyrus, indicating that this region might be a multisensory cortex of visual-auditory emotional perception. In summary, our study provided important evidence for further understanding the processing of emotion perception in different modalities and multisensory cortex of cross-channel emotion perception.

The Case for Compatibility: Product Attitudes and Purchase Intentions for Upper versus Lowercase Brand Names

Although retailers know that brand names are important conveyors of product benefits, little is known about how subtle characteristics of brand names affect consumer attitudes and purchase intentions. This research proposes and shows that the letter case of brand names affects product attitudes and purchase intentions but that these effects depend on congruity between brand case and the gender of consumption benefits. Studies 1 and 2 show that lowercase brand names are associated with feminine characteristics while uppercase brand names are associated with masculine characteristics, as measured through judgments of name gender, gendered brand personality traits, and overall brand gender perceptions. Three additional studies demonstrate that greater congruity between brand case and the gender of consumption benefits increases product evaluations and purchase intentions. Study 3 demonstrates that greater congruity between brand case and the gender of a female consumer’s consumption goal leads her to have more favorable product attitudes. Study 4 replicates these effects by manipulating the gender of product benefits, shows that effects on purchase intentions are moderated by the consumer’s biological sex, and identifies processing fluency as the underlying mechanism. Study 5 demonstrates that brand case, rather than letter shape, drives these results. This work advances understanding of how seemingly subtle brand name characteristics affect gender perceptions and consumer behavior, with implications for brand design and positioning in the retailing industry.

Confidence carryover during interleaved memory and perception judgments.

Recognition memory tests typically consist of randomly intermixed studied and nonstudied items that subjects classify as old or new, often while indicating their confidence in these classifications. Under most decision theories, confidence ratings index an item's memory strength-the extent to which it elicits evidence of prior occurrence. Because the test probes are randomly ordered, these theories predict that confidence judgments should be sequentially independent: confidence on trial n should not predict confidence on n + 1. However, analysis of two extant data sets demonstrated reliable serial correlations in recognition memory confidence (confidence carryover). In a new experiment, we examined the domain specificity of confidence carryover by serially interleaving recognition and perceptual classification judgments. Analysis revealed domain-general and domain-specific confidence carryover effects: The confidence of a current recognition judgment was shown to reflect both the confidence of an immediately preceding perceptual gender judgment (domain-general carryover at Lag 1) and also the confidence of the recognition judgment prior to that (domain-specific carryover at Lag 2). Moreover, the domain-specific effect was sensitive to response consistency: Confidence carryover was highest when old-new classifications repeated across trials. Whereas the domain-general effect may reflect metacognitive monitoring of internal factors such as alertness, the domain-specific effect was easily simulated by assuming that evidence within domains is "sticky," such that current memory or perceptual evidence is pulled toward prior evidence representations.

Nicotine effects on associative learning in human non-smokers.

Tobacco smoking is the most common preventable cause of death in the US. Nicotine is considered the primary constituent responsible for tobacco addiction. Its paradoxically high abuse potential may reflect behavioral control by drug-associated stimuli, which appears to play a larger role for tobacco dependence than for other abused drugs. We tested a potential explanation, hypothesizing that nicotine enhances associative learning, the mechanism underlying the conditioning of drug-associated stimuli. Thirty-two non-smokers were exposed to transdermal nicotine (7 mg/24 h) and placebo in a double-blind cross-over study and tested with behavioral paradigms designed to isolate incidental stimulus-stimulus or stimulus-response learning. The stop signal task required speeded gender judgments of face stimuli. A tone signaled when to withhold the response. Unbeknownst to participants, some faces were always paired with stop trials. Nicotine enhanced the facilitation of stop-responses to these stimuli, and the slowing of go-responses when previously stop-associated stimuli were paired with go trials, indicating stronger associations between paired stimuli and the stop signal/stop response. Another task required feedback-based learning of associations between pairs of shape stimuli. Five pairs were made from either ten different stimuli, or from different combinations of two identical sets of five stimuli with correct associations depending on contextual information. Nicotine increased incorrect choices of stimuli that were associated in a different context, indicating stronger stimulus-stimulus associations at the expense of flexible context-adaptive behavior. The results indicate that nicotine can enhance incidental associative learning, a mechanism that may promote the formation of smoking-associated stimuli and cue-controlled drug-taking.

Disambiguating auditory information causes priming, but not aftereffects, in the perception of ambiguous faces

In five experiments, we used a visual aftereffects paradigm to probe whether emotion- and gender-relevant information presented in the auditory domain would affect the formation of visual aftereffects or would instead create a priming effect. In experiment 1, participants fixated on surprise facial expressions while listening to a story that described the surprise as either happy or sad, and then were asked to classify the expression of a briefly presented neutral face. Subsequently, the identity of the model (experiment 2) and the timing of the auditory presentation (experiment 3) were manipulated. In experiment 4, this approach was extended to judgments of gender. Experiment 5 serves as a control experiment in which the story, but no visual stimuli, was presented during the adaptation phase. In each case results revealed evidence of priming, but no evidence that information in the auditory domain affected the formation of aftereffects.

Tasks determine what is learned in visual statistical learning.

Visual statistical learning (VSL), the unsupervised learning of statistical contingencies across time and space, may play a key role in efficient and predictive encoding of the perceptual world. How VSL capabilities vary as a function of ongoing task demands is still poorly understood. VSL is modulated by selective attention and faces interference from some secondary tasks, but there is little evidence that the types of contingencies learned in VSL are sensitive to task demands. We found a powerful effect of task on what is learned in VSL. Participants first completed a visual familiarization task requiring judgments of face gender (female/male) or scene location (interior/exterior). Statistical regularities were embedded between stimulus pairs. During a surprise recognition phase, participants showed less recognition for pairs that had required a change in response key (e.g., female followed by male) or task (e.g., female followed by indoor) during familiarization. When familiarization required detection of "flicker" or "jiggle" events unrelated to image content, there was weaker, but uniform, VSL across pair types. These results suggest that simple task manipulations play a strong role in modulating the distribution of learning over different pair combinations. Such variations may arise from task and response conflict or because the manner in which images are processed is altered.

Effects of task-irrelevant emotional information on deception

ABSTRACTDeception has been reported to be influenced by task-relevant emotional information from an external stimulus. However, it remains unclear how task-irrelevant emotional information would influence deception. In the present study, facial expressions of different valence and emotion intensity were presented to participants, where they were asked to make either truthful or deceptive gender judgments according to the preceding cues. We observed the influence of facial expression intensity upon individuals’ cognitive cost of deceiving (mean difference of individuals’ truthful and deceptive response times). Larger cost was observed for high intensity faces compared to low intensity faces. These results provided insights on how automatic attraction of attention evoked by task-irrelevant emotional information in facial expressions influenced individuals’ cognitive cost of deceiving.

The relationship between perceived gender judgment and well-being among surgical residents

BackgroundPhysician well-being is a significant problem. Here we explore whether one factor, a resident's concern for being judged by one's gender, influences well-being. MethodsOver two years at one institution, we surveyed surgical residents on validated measures of well-being as well as the extent to which they felt they were judged because of their gender (gender judgment). We used correlations and linear regression to investigate the relationships between gender judgment and well-being. ResultsThere were 193 unique respondents (87% response rate). Women had significantly more concerns about gender judgment than men (M = 2.39, SD = 0.73 vs. M = 1.46, SD = 0.62, t = −9.47, p < 0.00001). In regression analyses, gender judgment concerns were significantly associated with all three well-being outcomes (Bs -0.34, 0.50, and 0.39, respectively for well-being, emotional exhaustion, and depersonalization, all p < 0.013). ConclusionsThe degree to which residents, both male and female, are concerned about being judged for their gender is significantly associated with worse well-being.

Repetition Blindness for Faces: A Comparison of Face Identity, Expression, and Gender Judgments.

Repetition blindness (RB) refers to the impairment in reporting two identical targets within a rapid serial visual presentation stream. While numerous studies have demonstrated RB for words and picture of objects, very few studies have examined RB for faces. This study extended this research by examining RB when the two faces were complete repeats (same emotion and identity), identity repeats (same individual, different emotion), and emotion repeats (different individual, same emotion) for identity, gender, and expression judgment tasks. Complete RB and identity RB effects were evident for all three judgment tasks. Emotion RB was only evident for the expression and gender judgments. Complete RB effects were larger than emotion or identity RB effects across all judgment tasks. For the expression judgments, there was more emotion than identity RB. The identity RB effect was larger than the emotion RB effect for the gender judgments. Cross task comparisons revealed larger complete RB effects for the expression and gender judgments than the identity decisions. There was a larger emotion RB effect for the expression than gender judgments and the identity RB effect was larger for the gender than for the identity and expression judgments. These results indicate that while faces are subject to RB, this is affected by the type of repeated information and relevance of the facial characteristic to the judgment decision. This study provides further support for the operation of separate processing mechanisms for face gender, emotion, and identity information within models of face recognition.