Citation: Pletzer B (2015) Editorial: From sex differences in neuroscience to a neuroscience of sex differences: new directions and perspectives. While we are looking back at a century of behavioral research on sex differences in cognition and emotion, sex differences have for a long time been disregarded as a confound in neuroscience. Several researchers still argue that sex differences in cog...

Estrogen has a key role in explaining gender differences in dopaminergic functioning. To date, previous studies on estrogen have focused on inhibitory output control, such as the intentional suppression of overt pre-potent actions, but whether input control is also modulated is an open question. For the first time, this study compared the ability to perform a cued target-detection task that mea...

Economic experiments have shown that in mixed gender groups women are more reluctant than men to choose tournaments when given the choice between piece rate and winner-take-all tournament style compensation. These gender difference experiments have all relied on a framework where subjects were not informed of their abilities relative to potential competitors. We replicate these findings with ma...

In human females cyclic shifts in preference have been documented for odour and physical and behavioral male traits. Women prefer the smell of dominant males, more masculine male faces and men behaving more dominantly when at peak fertility than at other times in their menstrual cycle. Here we examine variation in preferences for body sexual dimorphism. Across two studies, both between- and wit...

Women's preferences for masculine versus feminine male faces are highly variable. According to a dominant theory in evolutionary psychology, this variability results from adaptations that optimize preferences by calibrating them to certain contextual factors, including women's self-perceived attractiveness, short- versus long-term relationship orientation, pathogen disgust sensitivity, and stag...

Relations between physical activity and prospectively collected menstrual cycle characteristics were examined in two large cohorts. One cohort consisted of women employed in the semiconductor industry in 1989 who participated in a prospective study of reproductive outcomes (n = 367). The other consisted of women living in Tecumseh, Michigan, who completed both the 1992-1993 and 1993-1994 examin...

We examined associations of age at menarche and menstrual characteristics with the risk of preeclampsia among participants (n = 3,365) of a pregnancy cohort study. Data were collected using in-person interviews and medical record abstraction. Logistic regression was used to estimate adjusted odds ratio (OR) and 95% confidence interval (95% CI). There was a significant inverse association betwee...

Data from women who enrolled between 1935 and 1939 in a long-term prospective study of menstrual and reproductive health, in which menstrual cycles and other events were recorded as they occurred, were analyzed to examine factors associated with age at natural menopause. Analysis was restricted to 561 women who enrolled before age 25 years and recorded data through at least age 44 years. Women ...

Considerable research supports the widespread complaint of mood and behavioral changes during the menstrual cycle. However, there is little evidence of effects on intellectual performance, even though students commonly complain of it. We studied the results obtained by 244 female medical and paramedical students in all examinations taken during one year. In view of suspected correlations betwee...

This study investigated whether for females, who are said to be less strongly lateralized for cognitive functions than men, hemispheric superiority might depend on the phase of the menstrual cycle. The results show that while asymmetry in lexical decisions did not change throughout the menstrual cycle, asymmetry in face perception decreased linearly from a large right hemisphere superiority dur...