Hormonal and modality specific effects on males' emotion recognition ability.

Successful emotion recognition is a key component of human socio-emotional communication skills. However, little is known about the factors impacting males' accuracy in emotion recognition tasks. This pre-registered study examined potential candidates, focusing on the modality of stimulus presentation, emotion category and individual baseline hormone levels. In an additional exploratory analysis, we examined the association of testosterone x cortisol interaction with recognition accuracy and reaction times. We obtained accuracy and reaction time scores from 282 males who categorized voice, face and voice-face stimuli for nonverbal emotional content. Results showed that recognition accuracy was significantly higher in the audio-visual than in the auditory or visual modality. While Spearman's rank correlations showed no significant association of testosterone (T) with recognition accuracy or with response times for specific emotions, the logistic and linear regression models uncovered some evidence for a positive association between T and recognition accuracy as well as between cortisol (C) and reaction time. In addition, the overall effect size of T by C interaction with recognition accuracy and reaction time was significant, but small. Our results establish that audio-visual congruent stimuli enhance recognition accuracy and provide novel empirical support by showing that the interaction of testosterone and cortisol relates to males' accuracy and response times in emotion recognition tasks.

Rules and heuristics during sentence comprehension: evidence from a dual-task brain potential study.

Whether syntactic and semantic processes during sentence comprehension follow strict sets of rules or succumb to context-dependent heuristics was studied by recording event-related potentials in a dual-task design. In one condition, sentence-extraneous acoustic material was either semantically congruent or incongruent relative to an adjective in the visually presented sentence, the latter being either semantically correct or incorrect within the sentence context. Homologous syntactic (gender) manipulations were performed in another condition. Syntactic processing within the sentence appeared to be blind to the syntactic content of the second task. In contrast, semantically incongruous material of the second task induced fluctuations typically associated with the detection of within-sentence semantic anomalies (N400) even in semantically correct sentences. Subtle but extant differences in topography between this N400 and that obtained with within-sentence semantic violations add to recent proposals of separate semantic subsystems differing in their specificity for sentence structure and computational procedures. Semantically incongruous material of the second task also influenced later stages of the processing of semantically incorrect adjectives (P600 component), which are traditionally assumed to pertain to the syntactic domain. This result is discussed in the light of current proposals of a third combinatorial stream in sentence comprehension.