Sex differences in the effects of stress on emotion recognition

Abstract

Research suggests that females are generally better at emotion recognition than males, but emotion type may moderate this difference. Stress responses may also be moderated by sex, and may affect emotion recognition. Minimal research has examined the effect of stress on sex differences in emotion recognition. The present study examined the moderating effects of sex, stress (high/low), cortisol reactivity (responders/non-responders), and emotion type (threat/non-threat) on auditory and visual emotion recognition accuracy and reaction time (RT). A psychosocial stress task was used to effectively induce stress, as demonstrated by significant stress group differences in subjective stress, cortisol, and heart rate (HR) increases. For facial emotion, a significant interaction showed that females who demonstrated a cortisol stress response were slower than non-responders, whereas male responders were faster than non-responders. An interaction trend emerged for facial emotion when controlling for RT, in which females were faster than males in the low stress condition, but slower than males in the high stress condition. For auditory emotion, cortisol responders demonstrated increased accuracy and decreased RT for threat emotions, but sex did not moderate these effects. Collectively the results suggest that stress and cortisol reactivity may improve emotion recognition, but only in males on facial tasks.