Gender Difference in Event Related Potentials to Masked Emotional Stimuli in the Oddball Task

OBJECTIVE We investigated gender differences in event-related potential (ERP) responses to subliminally presented threat-related stimuli. METHODS Twenty-four participants were presented with threat-related and neutral pictures for a very brief period of time (17 ms). To explore gender differences in ERP responses to subliminally presented stimuli, we examined six ERP components [P1, N170, N250, P300, Early Posterior Negativity (EPN) and Late Positive Potential (LPP)]. RESULTS The result revealed that only female participants showed significant increases in the N170 and the EPN in response to subliminally presented threat-related stimuli compared to neutral stimuli. CONCLUSION Our results suggest that female participants exhibit greater cortical processing of subliminally presented threat-related stimuli than male participants.