ArticleSocial cognitive and affective neuroscience2014
Sex differences in the neural correlates of affective experience.
Article in Social cognitive and affective neuroscience, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 26 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
26 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 78 citations in OpenAlex.
- The Brain Basis of Positive and Negative Affect: Evidence from a Meta-Analysis of the Human Neuroimaging Literature.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2016Pooled it
- Alcohol misuse and negative emotion processing in neurotypical drinkers: Sex differences in behavioral and neural markers.Psychiatry research. Neuroimaging · 2026Article
- Electroconvulsive therapy modulates Fronto-temporal functional connectivity in adolescents with depression and suicidal ideation.Frontiers in neuroimaging · 2026Article
- Sexual differences in neuronal and synaptic properties across subregions of the mouse insular cortex.Biology of sex differences · 2024Article
- Sex differences in the effects of individual anxiety state on regional responses to negative emotional scenes.Biology of sex differences · 2024Article
- Sex differences in the effects of trait anxiety and age on resting-state functional connectivities of the amygdala.Journal of affective disorders reports · 2023Article
- Sexual differences in neuronal and synaptic properties across subregions of the mouse insular cortex.Research square · 2023Article
- Social reappraisal of emotions is linked with the social presence effect in the default mode network.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2023Article
- Coping drinking motives, neural functional coupling during emotion processing, and alcohol use in young adults with bipolar disorder.Alcoholism, clinical and experimental research · 2022Article
- Human threat circuits: Threats of pain, aggressive conspecific, and predator elicit distinct BOLD activations in the amygdala and hypothalamus.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2022Article
- Affective and cognitive brain-networks are differently integrated in women and men while experiencing compassion.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Better living through understanding the insula: Why subregions can make all the difference.Neuropharmacology · 2021Review
- Brain, behavioral, affective, and sex correlates of recovery from alcohol use disorders.Alcoholism, clinical and experimental research · 2021Article
- Regional and Temporal Differences in Brain Activity With Morally Good or Bad Judgments in Men: A Magnetoencephalography Study.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2021Article
- Gender differences in anxiety: The mediating role of sensitivity to unpredictable threat.International journal of psychophysiology : official journal of the International Organization of Psychophysiology · 2020Article
- BNST-insula structural connectivity in humans.NeuroImage · 2020Article
- The most important attribute: stakeholder perspectives on what matters most in a physician.Current oncology (Toronto, Ont.) · 2020Article
- Epigenetic Modifications in Stress Response Genes Associated With Childhood Trauma.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2019Review
- Early adverse life events are associated with altered brain network architecture in a sex- dependent manner.Neurobiology of stress · 2017Article
- Child gender influences paternal behavior, language, and brain function.Behavioral neuroscience · 2017Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
People believe that women are more emotionally intense than men, but the scientific evidence is equivocal. In this study, we tested the novel hypothesis that men and women differ in the neural correlates of affective experience, rather than in the intensity of neural activity, with women being more internally (interoceptively) focused and men being more externally (visually) focused. Adult men (n = 17) and women (n = 17) completed a functional magnetic resonance imaging study while viewing affectively potent images and rating their moment-to-moment feelings of subjective arousal. We found that men and women do not differ overall in their intensity of moment-to-moment affective experiences when viewing evocative images, but instead, as predicted, women showed a greater association between the momentary arousal ratings and neural responses in the anterior insula cortex, which represents bodily sensations, whereas men showed stronger correlations between their momentary arousal ratings and neural responses in the visual cortex. Men also showed enhanced functional connectivity between the dorsal anterior insula cortex and the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, which constitutes the circuitry involved with regulating shifts of attention to the world. These results demonstrate that the same affective experience is realized differently in different people, such that women's feelings are relatively more self-focused, whereas men's feelings are relatively more world-focused.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.