Gender effects in emotional picture processing: an ERP study

Gender differences have always been a critical center of attention in psychological and psychophysiological research. Findings on this topic are especially important for the understanding of prevalence in psychological disorders, and could be used to create better treatment outcomes when factoring in these differences. In this experiment, 40 subjects (20 females) were selected from a previous larger sample, to participate a passive viewing task in which emotional images were presented on a computer screen and the 64-channel EEG was recorded. These images were divided in positive- and negative-valenced stimuli in order to investigate participants’ physiological responses. Furthermore, they were asked to rate their valence and arousal to obtain a subjective evaluation by means of the SelfAssessment Manikin (SAM). This research was carried out to investigate possible gender differences on both psychophysiological data and subjective evaluations, with the purpose of shedding light on the ERP components that could highlight the differences between male and female brains (i.e., P1 and P300 components) and therefore finding out which one could be the more sensitive to the gender variable.