| dc.description.abstract |
Body motion is a rich and reliable source of information for daily life social
cognition, interaction and non-verbal communication. Yet gender effects in body
language reading are largely unknown, and a few previous findings are sparse
and controversial. Investigation of gender impact on body language reading is
of substantial value for clarification of the nature of neurodevelopmental and
psychiatric disorders (such as autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder,
eating and anxiety disorders) characterized by aberrant social cognition. Many
of these disorders are gender-specific: females and males are differently
affected in terms of clinical picture, prevalence, and severity. The motivation of
the present work was to clarify whether, and, if so, how gender affects body
language reading in typically developing adults. We intended to make a step
toward a framework for evaluation gender differences in the social brain in
psychiatric and neurodevelopmental disorders. In our experiments, body motion
was represented by a point-light technique as a set of dots on the joints of an
otherwise invisible body. This helps to isolate information revealed by body
motion from other visual cues (e.g., color, shape). In the first study (Sokolov et
al., 2011), by using a three alternative-forced choice paradigm, participants had
to indicate whether a display portrayed happy, neutral or angry knocking at a
door. The findings show that gender affects accuracy rather than speed of body
language reading. This effect, however, is modulated by emotional content of
actions: males surpass in recognition accuracy of happy actions, whereas
females tend to excel in recognition of hostile angry knocking movement. In the
second study (Krüger et al., 2013), a similar pattern of results was found for
subtle emotions expressed by point-light human locomotion: Males surpass
females in recognition accuracy and readiness to respond to happy walking
portrayed by female actors, whereas females tend to be better in recognition of
angry locomotion expressed by male actors. In contrast to widespread beliefs
about female superiority in social cognition, this work suggests that gender
effects in body language reading are largely modulated by emotional content of
actions. Further research should combine methods of social neuroscience to
uncover neural circuits underlying gender differences in the social brain. |
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