Indeed, using functional neuroimaging

Killgore, PD0332991 chemical structure Oki, and Yurgelun-Todd (2001) showed that sex-specific changes in amygdala and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex reactivity to affective facial expressions emerged during puberty. Our findings in the adults partly replicate previous results in a group of 68 psychology undergraduate students, in which sex differences were found in the advantage of women for the emotions sadness, surprise, anger, and disgust (Montagne et al., 2005). However, apart from the study sample, there are methodological differences between the current set-up and the previous study, in that in Montagne et al. (2005), the emotional expressions were presented in side-view perspective as well. Also, in addition to assessing accuracy for labelling (similar to the present study), sensitivity for the emotions was assessed by asking the participants to move through the animated sequence and indicate the point at which they start to recognize the expression. These methodological differences may explain the discrepancy between study findings in relation to sex differences in emotion perception (Kret & De Gelder, 2012), as some paradigms are more sensitive to small between-group MAPK inhibitor differences than others. Indeed, Hoffmann, Kessler,

Eppel, Rukavina, and Traue (2010) demonstrated that facial expressions presented at lower intensities resulted in sex differences Branched chain aminotransferase in favour of females, but this effect disappeared when full-blown emotional expressions were shown. However, we would like to emphasize that in our study (and in general), sex differences in recognition of emotional expressions are small and great overlap is present in the performance of men and women. IQ was only positively correlated with the ability to recognize disgust in the children. Possibly, the verbal label of disgust may be relatively difficult compared with the other emotions, and better

understood by children with higher levels of intelligence. Brechet, Baldy, and Picard (2009), for instance, demonstrated that the ability to understand the emotion disgust was relatively poor in children overall (i.e., only 40% correct responses even in a group of 11-year olds). Indeed, and in line with our results, intelligence was found to predict the performance on disgust in the study by Horning et al., 2012 as well. In adults, years of education (which is highly correlated with intellectual ability) correlated strongly with the recognition of fear, happiness, sadness, and the ERT Total Score. As years of education is a predictor of performance on many cognitive tests (Lezak et al., 2012), we adjusted our normative data accordingly (in addition to age). Looking at the differences in performance across the six emotions, differences were found that are in accordance with other findings (e.g., Young et al., 2002; Montagne, Kessels, et al., 2007; Ruffman et al., 2008).