Abstract
In this study, employing event-related potential (ERP) in response to faces and object stimuli, we explored the temporal course of cognitive biases and sex differences for facial attractiveness during a visual oddball paradigm. 10 women and 10 men were confronted with this task, within which they were asked to point out, as fast as possible, rare attractive or unattractive faces of neutral expression among a series of frequent stimuli (neutral objects). Behavioral analyses showed that men yielded longer reaction times than women, and deviant attractive faces were detected more slowly compared with deviant unattractive ones only for men. In accordance with the behavioral results, the ERP results showed that with respect to women, the N2b peak latencies were prolonged for both attractive and unattractive faces in men, perhaps reflecting early implicit attention to distinctive faces. Thereafter, for both sexes, deviant attractive faces evoked greater P3b amplitudes in comparison to deviant unattractive faces, revealing the cognitive biases toward facial beauty. Importantly, only in men, the P3b peak latencies were longer for attractive faces as opposed to their unattractive counterparts. Thus, it is likely that sex differences found in the detection of facial attractiveness could begin quite early in the information processing mechanism. Moreover, from an evolutionary view, the ERP and behavioral evidence together confirmed a reasonable supposition that although both men and women showed processing preferences for attractive faces, compared with women, men might attribute more value to distinctive evolution-related cues, especially to attractive information.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Ohman A, Flykt A, Esteves F (2001) Emotion drives attention: detecting the snake in the grass. J Exp Psychol Gen 130(3):466–478
Fox E, Russo R, Bowles R, Dutton K (2007) Do threatening stimuli draw or hold visual attention in subclinical anxiety? J Exp Psychol Gen 130(4):681–700
Vuilleumier P (2005) How brains beware: neural mechanisms of emotional attention. Trends Cognitive Sci 9(12):585–594
Aharon I, Etcoff N, Ariely D, Chabris CF, O’Connor E, Breiter HC (2001) Beautiful faces have variable reward value: fMRI and behavioral evidence. Neuron 32(3):537–551
O’Doherty J, Winston J, Critchley H, Perrett D, Burt DM, Dolan RJ (2003) Beauty in a smile: the role of medial orbitofrontal cortex in facial attractiveness. Neuropsychologia 41(2):147–155
Senior C (2003) Beauty in the brain of the beholder. Neuron 38(4):525–528
Halgren E et al (1994) Spatio-temporal stages in face and word processing. 2. Depth-recorded potentials in the human frontal and rolandic cortices. J Physiol Paris 88(1):51–80
Campanella S, Gaspard C, Debatisse D, Bruyer R, Crommelinck M, Guerit J-M (2002) Discrimination of emotional facial expressions in a visual oddball task: an ERP study. Biol Psychol 59(3):171–186
Johnston VS, Oliver-Rodriguez JC (1997) Facial beauty and the late positive component of event-related potentials. J Sex Res 34(2):188–198
Oliver-rodrÃguez JC, Guan Z, Johnston VS (1999) Gender differences in late positive components evoked by human faces. Psychophysiology 36(2):176–185
Marzi T, Viggiano MP (2010) When memory meets beauty: insights from event-related potentials. Biol Psychol 84(2):192–205
Zhang Y et al (2011) Identifying cognitive preferences for attractive female faces: an event-related potential experiment using a study-test paradigm. J Neurosci Res 89(11):1887–1893
Langeslag SJ, Jansma BM, Franken IH, Van Strien JW (2007) Event-related potential responses to love-related facial stimuli. Biol Psychol 90(3):211–217
Werheid K, Schacht A, Sommer W (2007) Facial attractiveness modulates early and late event-related brain potentials. Biol Psychol 76(1–2):100–108
Schupp HT, Stockburger J, Bublatzky F, Junghöfer M, Weike AI, Hamm AO (2007) Explicit attention interferes with selective emotion processing in human extrastriate cortex. BMC Neurosci 8(1):16
Carretié L, Hinojosa JA, MartÃn-Loeches M, Mercado F, Tapia M (2004) Automatic attention to emotional stimuli: neural correlates. Hum Brain Mapp 22(4):290–299
van Hooff JC, Crawford H, van Vugt M (2011) The wandering mind of men: erp evidence for gender differences in attention bias towards attractive opposite sex faces. Soc Cognitive Affect Neurosci 6(4):477–485
Campanella S et al (2004) Human gender differences in an emotional visual oddball task: an event-related potentials study. Neurosci Lett 367:14–18
Oriental Face Database (OFD). http://www.aiar.xjtu.edu.cn/groups/face/Chinese/Homepage.htm
Luck SJ (2005) Basic principles of ERP recording, in an introduction to the event-related potential technique. MIT Press, Cambridge, p 107
Wilson M, Daly M (2004) Do pretty women inspire men to discount the future? Proc Roy Soc B Biol Sci 271(4):S177–S179
Chen A, Luo Y, Wang Q, Yuan J, Yao D, Li H (2007) Electrophysiological correlates of category induction: PSW amplitude as an index of identifying shared attributes. Biol Psychol 76(3):230–238
Eimer M (2000) The face-specific N170 component reflects late stages in the structural encoding of faces. NeuroReport 11(10):2319–2324
Foti D, Hajcak G, Dien J (2009) Differentiating neural responses to emotional pictures: evidence from temporal-spatial PCA. Psychophysiology 46(3):521–530
Schupp HT, Ohman A, Junghöfer M, Weike AI, Stockburger J, Hamm AO (2004) The facilitated processing of threatening faces: an ERP analysis. Emotion 4(2):189–200
Rhodes G (2006) The evolutionary psychology of facial beauty. Annu Rev Psychol 57(1):199–226
Gur RC, Gunning-Dixon F, Bilker WB, Gur RE (2002) Sex differences in temporo-limbic and frontal brain volumes of healthy adults. Cereb Cortex 12(9):998–1003
Wrase J (2003) Gender differences in the processing of standardized emotional visual stimuli in humans: a functional magnetic resonance imaging study. Neurosci Lett 348(1):41–45
Davidson RJ, Irwin W (1999) The functional neuroanatomy of emotion and affective style. Trends Cognitive Sci 3(1):11–21
Buss DM, Schmitt DP (1993) Sexual strategies theory: an evolutionary perspective on human mating. Psychol Rev 100(2):204–232
Acknowledgments
This work was supported by the National Science Foundation of China (NSFC) under grants No. 90820305 and No. 60775040. The authors are grateful to all subjects for their interest and participation as well as the Laboratory of Neural Engineering of Tsinghua University for offering the Neuroscan Synamps recording equipment.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2014 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Zhang, Z., Deng, Z. (2014). Human Gender Differences in Cognitive Preferences Toward Attractive Faces in a Visual Oddball Paradigm: An ERP Study. In: Sun, F., Hu, D., Liu, H. (eds) Foundations and Practical Applications of Cognitive Systems and Information Processing. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 215. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-37835-5_10
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-37835-5_10
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-37834-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-37835-5
eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)