Original articleA developmental examination of gender differences in brain engagement during evaluation of threat
Section snippets
Participants
Seventeen healthy adults (8 women) aged 25 to 36 years and 17 healthy adolescents (8 girls) aged 9 to 17 years participated in the study. Adolescent boys and girls did not differ in age, t(15) = .45, p = .66 (see Table 1 for mean ages by group). Data from three additional adults and six additional adolescents were excluded from the analysis because of problems with subject task performance, excessive motion, or technical problems during the scan. All participants were healthy as determined by
Activation to unambiguous threat versus other facial expressions
We first examined three-way interactions among age group, gender, and pairs of emotion types (angry-neutral, angry-fearful, angry-happy). These analyses were designed to test our primary a priori hypotheses that gender differences in activation would exist and would be greater in adults than adolescents. Region of interest analyses corrected for multiple comparisons within each region revealed significant interactions between age group and gender for the angry versus neutral and angry versus
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to Andrea Hoberman, Alison Merikangas, Lee Anne Montgomery, Suzanne Munson, Kenneth Towbin, Alan Zametkin, Jennifer Cameron, Jan Ebron, and Harvey Iwamoto for their assistance in completing this study.
References (51)
Neural systems for recognizing emotion
Curr Opin Neurobiol
(2002)- et al.
The feasibility of a common stereotactic space for children and adults in fMRI studies of development
Neuroimage
(2002) - et al.
To smooth or not to smooth? Bias and efficiency in fMRI time-series analysis
Neuroimage
(2000) - et al.
Generalisability, random effects and population inference
Neuroimage
(1998) - et al.
Gender differences in brain and behaviorHormonal and neural bases
Pharmacol Biochem Behav
(1999) - et al.
Neural substrates of facial emotion processing using fMRI
Brain Res Cogn Brain Res
(2001) - et al.
Task instructions modulate neural responses to fearful facial expressions
Biol Psychiatry
(2003) - et al.
Gender differences in neural correlates of recognition of happy and sad faces in humans assessed by functional magnetic resonance imaging
Neurosci Lett
(2002) - et al.
The spectrum of social phobia in the Zurich cohort study of young adults
Biol Psychiatry
(2002) - et al.
Adolescent immaturity in attention-related brain engagement to emotional facial expressions
Neuroimage
(2003)