Emotion recognition and regulation in males: Role of sex and stress steroids.

Understanding emotions in males is crucial given their higher susceptibility to substance use, interpersonal violence, and suicide compared to females. Steroid hormones are assumed to be critical biological factors that affect and modulate emotion-related behaviors, together with psychological and social factors. This review explores whether males' abilities to recognize emotions of others and regulate their own emotions are associated with testosterone, cortisol, and their interaction. Higher levels of testosterone were associated with improved recognition and heightened sensitivity to threatening faces. In contrast, higher cortisol levels positively impacted emotion regulation ability. Indirect evidence from neuroimaging research suggested a link between higher testosterone levels and difficulties in cognitive emotion regulation. However, this notion must be investigated in future studies using different emotion regulation strategies and considering social status. The present review contributes to the understanding of how testosterone and cortisol affect psychological well-being and emotional behavior in males.

Language lateralization in temporal lobe epilepsy: A behavioral screening tool for surgical planning.

OBJECTIVE: Temporal lobe epilepsy can disturb eloquent areas, affecting language. We applied a visually-mediated task to measure lateralization of language recognition in drug-resistant temporal lobe epilepsy. METHOD: Patients with left (n = 26), right (n = 28) temporal lobe epilepsy and controls (n = 30) were administered the translingual lexical decision task. We performed repeated measures analyses of variance, with the visual half-field as an intrasubject factor and the group as an intersubject factor. RESULTS: A main effect of visual half-field was found, showing the right visual field (left hemisphere) advantage for both accuracy and response time. A main effect of the group was found in accuracy, showing that both epilepsy groups performed less accurately than controls, and left temporal lobe epilepsy performed less accurately than right temporal lobe epilepsy. Also, the group-by-visual half-field interaction was significant. Post hoc t tests indicated the controls and right temporal lobe epilepsy performed better in the right visual field than in the left visual field, whereas no visual half-field effect was found in left temporal lobe epilepsy. For response times, the interaction was also significant. Post hoc t tests showed a significant right visual-field advantage for controls (two-tailed) and for the right temporal lobe epilepsy (one-tailed). Right visual-field advantage was absent in left temporal lobe epilepsy. CONCLUSIONS: The translingual lexical decision task can efficiently distinguish between left and right temporal lobe epilepsy. Compared to right temporal lobe epilepsy and controls, language lateralization is diminished in left temporal lobe epilepsy. The potential use of the translingual lexical decision task as an effective noninvasive presurgical language lateralization screening tool is highlighted. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Recommendations for a Better Understanding of Sex and Gender in the Neuroscience of Mental Health.

There are prominent sex/gender differences in the prevalence, expression, and life span course of mental health and neurodiverse conditions. However, the underlying sex- and gender-related mechanisms and their interactions are still not fully understood. This lack of knowledge has harmful consequences for those with mental health problems. Therefore, we set up a cocreation session in a 1-week workshop with a multidisciplinary team of 25 researchers, clinicians, and policy makers to identify the main barriers in sex and gender research in the neuroscience of mental health. Based on this work, here we provide recommendations for methodologies, translational research, and stakeholder involvement. These include guidelines for recording, reporting, analysis beyond binary groups, and open science. Improved understanding of sex- and gender-related mechanisms in neuroscience may benefit public health because this is an important step toward precision medicine and may function as an archetype for studying diversity.

Dichotic-listening performance after complete callosotomy: No relief from left-ear extinction by selective attention.

The surgical section of the corpus callosum (callosotomy) has been frequently demonstrated to result in a left-ear extinction in dichotic listening. That is, callosotomy patients report the left-ear stimulus below chance level, resulting in substantially enhanced right-ear advantage (REA) compared with controls. A small number of previous studies also suggest that callosotomy patients can overcome left-ear extinction when the instruction encourages to attend selectively to the left-ear stimulus. In the present case study, we re-examine the role of selective attention in dichotic listening in two patients with complete callosotomy and 40 age- and sex-matched controls. We used the standardised Bergen dichotic-listening paradigm which uses stop-consonant-vowel syllables as stimulus material and includes both a free-report and selective-attention condition. As was predicted, both patients showed a clear left-ear extinction. However, contrasting the earlier reports, we did not find any evidence for a relief from this extinction by selectively attending to the left-ear stimulus. We conclude that previous demonstrations of an attention-improved left-ear recall in callosotomy patients may be attributed to the use of suboptimal dichotic paradigms or residual callosal connectivity, rather than representing a genuine effect of attention.

Laterality indices consensus initiative (LICI): A Delphi expert survey report on recommendations to record, assess, and report asymmetry in human behavioural and brain research.

Laterality indices (LIs) quantify the left-right asymmetry of brain and behavioural variables and provide a measure that is statistically convenient and seemingly easy to interpret. Substantial variability in how structural and functional asymmetries are recorded, calculated, and reported, however, suggest little agreement on the conditions required for its valid assessment. The present study aimed for consensus on general aspects in this context of laterality research, and more specifically within a particular method or technique (i.e., dichotic listening, visual half-field technique, performance asymmetries, preference bias reports, electrophysiological recording, functional MRI, structural MRI, and functional transcranial Doppler sonography). Experts in laterality research were invited to participate in an online Delphi survey to evaluate consensus and stimulate discussion. In Round 0, 106 experts generated 453 statements on what they considered good practice in their field of expertise. Statements were organised into a 295-statement survey that the experts then were asked, in Round 1, to independently assess for importance and support, which further reduced the survey to 241 statements that were presented again to the experts in Round 2. Based on the Round 2 input, we present a set of critically reviewed key recommendations to record, assess, and report laterality research for various methods.

Sex/Gender Differences in Brain Lateralisation and Connectivity.

There is now a significant body of literature concerning sex/gender differences in the human brain. This chapter will critically review and synthesise key findings from several studies that have investigated sex/gender differences in structural and functional lateralisation and connectivity. We argue that while small, relative sex/gender differences reliably exist in lateralisation and connectivity, there is considerable overlap between the sexes. Some inconsistencies exist, however, and this is likely due to considerable variability in the methodologies, tasks, measures, and sample compositions between studies. Moreover, research to date is limited in its consideration of sex/gender-related factors, such as sex hormones and gender roles, that can explain inter-and inter-individual differences in brain and behaviour better than sex/gender alone. We conclude that conceptualising the brain as 'sexually dimorphic' is incorrect, and the terms 'male brain' and 'female brain' should be avoided in the neuroscientific literature. However, this does not necessarily mean that sex/gender differences in the brain are trivial. Future research involving sex/gender should adopt a biopsychosocial approach whenever possible, to ensure that non-binary psychological, biological, and environmental/social factors related to sex/gender, and their interactions, are routinely accounted for.

Sex/Gender Differences in Verbal Fluency and Verbal-Episodic Memory: A Meta-Analysis.

Women are thought to fare better in verbal abilities, especially in verbal-fluency and verbal-memory tasks. However, the last meta-analysis on sex/gender differences in verbal fluency dates from 1988. Although verbal memory has only recently been investigated meta-analytically, a comprehensive meta-analysis is lacking that focuses on verbal memory as it is typically assessed, for example, in neuropsychological settings. On the basis of 496 effect sizes and 355,173 participants, in the current meta-analysis, we found that women/girls outperformed men/boys in phonemic fluency (ds = 0.12-0.13) but not in semantic fluency (ds = 0.01-0.02), for which the sex/gender difference appeared to be category-dependent. Women/girls also outperformed men/boys in recall (d = 0.28) and recognition (ds = 0.12-0.17). Although effect sizes are small, the female advantage was relatively stable over the past 50 years and across lifetime. Published articles reported stronger female advantages than unpublished studies, and first authors reported better performance for members of their own sex/gender. We conclude that a small female advantage in phonemic fluency, recall, and recognition exists and is partly subject to publication bias. Considerable variance suggests further contributing factors, such as participants' language and country/region.

Spatial anxiety and self-confidence mediate sex/gender differences in mental rotation.

A recent meta-synthesis study with a sample of >12 million participants revealed that the male advantage in mental rotation (MR) is the largest cognitive sex/gender difference found in psychological literature. MR requires test takers to mentally rotate three-dimensional cubic figures under time restrictions. Previous studies have investigated how biological and social factors contribute to cognitive sex/gender differences in tasks of this type. Spatial anxiety and self-confidence in MR tasks have received less attention. The present study investigated the contribution of these psychological factors to sex/gender differences in MR performance. Participants (n = 269) completed two MR tasks that differed in task difficulty. Participants also indicated their self-confidence (for each item) and spatial anxiety. The results revealed that pronounced sex/gender differences in spatial anxiety and self-confidence mediate sex/gender in MR performance, especially when task demands are high. The current findings suggest that task-irrelevant factors that are not spatial cognitive in nature contribute largely to the well-known medium to large sex/gender differences in MR. Future studies should further explore mechanisms underlying cognitive sex/gender differences within a biopsychosocial approach.

Emotion lateralization in a graduated emotional chimeric face task: An online study.

OBJECTIVE: To resolve inconsistencies in the literature regarding the dominance of the right cerebral hemisphere (RH) in emotional face perception, specifically investigating the role of the intensity of emotional expressions, different emotions, and conscious perception. METHOD: The study used an online version of the well-established emotional chimeric face task (ECFT) in which participants judged which side of a chimeric face stimulus was more emotional. We tested the laterality bias in the ECFT across six basic emotions and experimentally modified the intensity of the emotional facial expression from neutral to fully emotional expressions, in incremental steps of 20%. RESULTS: The results showed an overall left hemiface bias across all emotions, supporting the RH hypothesis of emotional lateralization. However, the left hemiface bias decreased with decreasing intensity of the emotional facial expression. CONCLUSIONS: The results provide further support for the RH hypothesis and suggest that the RH dominance in emotional face perception may be affected by task difficulty and visual perception strategy. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Revisiting the attentional bias in the split brain.

Previous research has revealed a strong right bias in allocation of attention in split brain subjects, suggesting that a pathological attention bias occurs not only after unilateral (usually right-hemispheric) damage but also after functional disconnection of intact right-hemispheric areas involved in allocation of attention from those in the left hemisphere. Here, we investigated the laterality bias in spatial attention, as measured with the greyscales task, in two split-brain subjects (D.D.C. and D.D.V.) who had undergone complete callosotomy. The greyscales task requires participants to judge the darker (or brighter) of two left-right mirror-reversed luminance gradients under conditions of free viewing, and offers an efficient means of quantifying pathological attentional biases in patients with unilateral lesions. As predicted, the results of the two split-brain subjects revealed a pathological rightward bias in allocation of attention, suggesting strong dependence on a single hemisphere (the left) in spatial attention, which is opposite to what one expects from people with intact commissures, and is remarkable in that it occurs in free viewing. In that sense both split-brain patients are behaving as though the brain is indeed split, especially in D.D.C. who had undergone partial resection of the anterior commissure in addition to complete callosotomy, whereas the anterior commissure is still intact in D.D.V. The findings support the view that the commissural pathways play a significant role in integration of attentional processes across cerebral hemispheres.

Sex/gender differences in the brain are not trivial-A commentary on Eliot et al. (2021).

In this commentary to the comprehensive review by Eliot et al. (2021), we fully comply with rejecting the 'sexual dimorphism' concept in its extreme, binary form. However, we criticise the authors' extreme position and argue that sex/gender differences in the brain are far from being 'trivial' and 'unlikely to be meaningful'. Our key arguments refer to the importance of small effects which can have meaningful behavioural consequences, and to several non-binary sex/gender-related factors which might explain individual differences better than sex/gender per se and which have shown to play important roles as risk factors in the aetiology of many mental and neurodevelopmental disorders. We conclude that the biopsychosocial approach is key to understanding sex/gender differences in the brain better than we currently do.

Sex/gender differences in brain activity - it's time for a biopsychosocial approach to cognitive neuroscience.

There is compelling evidence that men and women differ in brain activity in long-term memory and other cognitive functions. However, until the origins of sex/gender differences in brain activity, and consequently behavior, are not fully understood, the factor sex/gender should be considered as imperfect proxy of a combination of yet unknown biological and psychosocial factors underlying these sex/gender differences. The key avenue to a full understanding of sex/gender differences in brain and behavior depends largely on cognitive neuroscience investigating sex/gender differences in brain activity within a biopsychosocial approach.

Gender stereotypes and incremental beliefs in STEM and non-STEM students in three countries: relationships with performance in cognitive tasks.

Women's underrepresentation in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) has been linked, among others, to gender stereotypes and ability-related beliefs as well as gender differences in specific cognitive abilities. However, the bulk of studies focused on gender stereotypes related to mathematics. The present study, therefore, aimed to map gender stereotypes and incremental beliefs (i.e., the conviction about modifiability) with respect to a wide range of stereotypical male-favouring and female-favouring abilities. Gender stereotypes and incremental beliefs were assessed with self-report questionnaires in 132 STEM students (65 women) and 124 non-STEM students (73 women) in three European countries ranked in the top, middle, and bottom of the Global Gender Gap Report. Moreover, a mental rotation and a verbal fluency test were completed. Men endorsed male-favouring stereotypes more than women, and women endorsed female-favouring stereotypes more than men, an effect that was most pronounced in the country with the larger gender gap. Male STEM students endorsed male-favouring stereotypes more strongly than male non-STEM and female STEM students. Male non-STEM students endorsed female-favouring stereotypes less than female and male STEM students. Female STEM students reported higher incremental beliefs than female non-STEM students, especially in the country with the lowest gender gap. Men outperformed women, and STEM students outperformed non-STEM in mental rotation, while women outperformed men in verbal fluency. Male STEM students' stronger endorsement of male-favouring stereotypes might reflect genuine group differences, at least in mental rotation. While potentially such gender stereotypes can help creating a "chilly climate" where women in academic STEM degrees are expected to perform poorly, those women believed more in the possibility to change and improve in male-favouring abilities which could help them to overcome the potential negative effect of stereotyping.

Laterality and (in)visibility in emotional face perception: Manipulations in spatial frequency content.

It is widely agreed that hemispheric asymmetries in emotional face perception exist. However, the mechanisms underlying this lateralization are not fully understood. In the present study, we tested whether (a) these asymmetries are driven by the low spatial frequency content of images depicting facial expressions, and (b) whether the effects differed depending on whether the emotional facial expressions were clearly visible or hidden (i.e., embedded in low spatial frequencies). The manipulation sheds light on the contribution of cortical and subcortical routes to emotional processing mechanisms. We prepared both unfiltered (broadband) and hybrid faces. Within the latter, different bands of spatial frequency content from images of 2 different expressions were combined (i.e., low frequencies from an emotional image combined with high frequencies from a neutral image). We presented these broadband and hybrid images using the free-viewing emotional chimeric faces task (ECFT) in which 2 images are presented above and below fixation and asked participants to report which of the 2 mirror reversed images appeared more emotional. As predicted, the results showed that only broadband expressions produced the well-known left visual field/right hemisphere (LVF/RH) bias across all basic emotions. For hybrid images, only happiness revealed a significant LVF/RH bias. These results suggest that low spatial frequency content of emotional facial expressions, which activates the magnocellular pathway in subcortical structures and bypassing cortical visual processing, is not generally sufficient to induce an LVF bias under free-viewing conditions where participants deny explicitly seeing the emotion, suggesting that the LVF bias in ECFT is primarily cortically mediated. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

The relationship between language ability and brain activity across language processes and modalities.

Existing neuroimaging studies on the relationship between language ability and brain activity have found contradictory evidence: On the one hand, increased activity with higher language ability has been interpreted as deeper or more adaptive language processing. On the other hand, decreased activity with higher language ability has been interpreted as more efficient language processing. In contrast to previous studies, the current study investigated the relationship between language ability and neural activity across different language processes and modalities while keeping non-linguistic cognitive task demands to a minimum. fMRI data were collected from 22 healthy adults performing a sentence listening task, a sentence reading task and a phonological production task. Outside the MRI scanner, language ability was assessed with the verbal scale of the Wechsler Abbreviated Scale of Intelligence (WASI-II) and a verbal fluency task. As expected, sentence comprehension activated the left anterior temporal lobe while phonological processing activated the left inferior frontal gyrus. Higher language ability was associated with increased activity in the left temporal lobe during auditory sentence processing and with increased activity in the left frontal lobe during phonological processing, reflected in both, higher intensity and greater extent of activations. Evidence for decreased activity with higher language ability was less consistent and restricted to verbal fluency. Together, the results predominantly support the hypothesis of deeper language processing in individuals with higher language ability. The consistency of results across language processes, modalities, and brain regions suggests a general positive link between language abilities and brain activity within the core language network. However, a negative relationship seems to exist for non-linguistic cognitive functions located outside the language network.

Antipsychotic effects of sex hormones and atypical hemispheric asymmetries.

Functional cerebral asymmetries (FCAs) are a fundamental principle of brain organisation. While specific patterns of asymmetry are characteristic of healthy human brains, atypical or reduced FCAs have been reported for several psychotic disorders, including schizophrenia and mood disorders. However, it is unclear whether atypical FCAs reflect a predisposition to psychotic disorders or a compensatory neural strategy for the progressive structural and functional changes in the brain associated with psychosis. A separate stream of research has demonstrated the antipsychotic effects of sex hormones in clinical populations. Moreover, modern neuroscience has shown that sex hormones, particularly estrogen and progesterone, can affect FCAs due to their organising effects (e.g., during prenatal development), and also by their activating effects throughout life (e.g., in younger women during the menstrual cycle or in post-menopausal women as a consequence of hormone therapy). By combining these research streams, this narrative literature review explores the relationship between the neuromodulatory properties of estrogen, FCAs and psychotic and psychotic-like symptoms. This research is not only of theoretical interest for the understanding of FCAs and psychotic symptoms, but might also be of clinical relevance for the development of stratified treatment approaches for women and men suffering from psychosis and mood disorders.

Sex differences and menstrual cycle effects in cognitive and sensory resting state networks.

It has not yet been established if resting state (RS) connectivity reflects stable characteristics of the brain, or if it is modulated by the psychological and/or physiological state of the participant. Based on research demonstrating sex hormonal effects in task-related brain activity, the present study aimed to investigate corresponding differences in RS networks. RS functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (RS fMRI) was conducted in women during three different menstrual cycle phases, while men underwent three repeated RS fMRI testing sessions. Independent component analysis was used to identify the default mode network (DMN) and an auditory RS network. For the DMN, RS connectivity was stable across testing sessions in men, but varied across the menstrual cycle in women. For the auditory network (AN), retest reliable sex difference was found. Although RS activity in the DMN has been interpreted as trait characteristic of functional brain organization, these findings suggest that RS activity in networks involving frontal areas might be less stable than in sensory-based networks and can dynamically fluctuate. This also implies that some of the previously reported effects of sex hormones on task-related activity might to some extent be mediated by cycle-related fluctuations in RS activity, especially when frontal areas are involved.