Isabelle Temesgen

Processing the emotions of others relies on a variety of neural networks and occurs in multiple phases that involve evaluating the emotional significance of a stimuli and assigning a corresponding level of attention to it. This linkage of emotion and attention appears to be particularly critical when facing expressions of threat or fearful faces. Existing research suggests a difference in emotion processing and attention bias to threat following the own-gender bias, such that participants would pay more attention to cues of the same sex. The objective of the study was to explore the neural interaction of emotions and gender via a masked cueing task, specifically how people respond to male or female cue faces and how the sex of the participant affects the response. We analyzed the N170, which is the adult event-related potential (ERP) waveform sensitive to human faces. Participants’ ERP activity was recorded using the adult-sized 128 channel HydroCel Geodesic Sensor Net from Magstim EGI. A two-way ANOVA was used to analyze differences in amplitude between the cue face location and the hemisphere from which the activity was recorded. A mixed ANOVA was used to analyze differences in the N170 amplitude based on participant sex, cue face sex, and hemisphere. N170 amplitudes originating in the right hemisphere were greater, but the difference was not statistically significant. This study did not find a significant effect of participant or cue face sex on the processing of emotions.