Emotional Intelligence and Gender: A Neurophysiological Perspective

Abstract

The chapter is divided into two parts. The first part provides a brief overview of gender differences in general and emotional intelligence (EI). The second part focuses on neurophysiological research relating brain activity with the level of ability and gender. Presented is also a recent study which examined the influence that gender has on brain responses to emotional stimuli. First, we endeavored to investigate neuroelectric responses of respondents to a distinct content category ('erotic'), as well as to the more general dimensions of emotional valence (positive, negative, and neutral). Second, we distinguished between more exogenous neuroelectric components—which mainly depend on the physical properties of sensory stimuli and are not influenced by cognitive manipulations—and endogenous components which depend on the nature of the subjects' interaction with the stimulus. We focused on the P3 and P1 ERP components. Also investigated were differences in evoked and induced gamma band response. The 28 male and 30 female students participating in the experiment were equalized with respect to verbal and performance intelligence (WAIS-R), EI (experimental version of MSCEIT, Mayer et al., 2002), and the personality factors of Extraversion and Neuroticism (BFQ, Caprara, Barbaranelli, Borgogni, Bucik, & Boben, 2002). Erotic pictures evoked the most robust neuroelectric responses in both males and females. This discrimination was present in the early time window of the P1 component of the ERP—a proximal index of attention allocation—and even more pronounced in the later endogenous component of the P3—functionally considered response-related (decision-making). A higher gamma amplitude was observed for all three groups of pictures with emotional content as compared with the neutral ones. With respect to the central question of the study, namely if gender has an influence on the neuroelectric brain responses to emotional stimuli, the data were less conclusive. The main finding is that females displayed much higher early gamma amplitude than did males. A second gender related difference was observed for the P3 amplitudes—females displayed higher P3 amplitudes in the right and left hemispheres than did males. These differences were not related to the emotional content of the presented stimuli. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved)