The Attentional Bias To Faces Affected By Women’s Menstrual Cycle

Menstrual cycle is a cyclical change which occurs in the uterus and ovary. As is well-known that a lot of women have premenstrual syndrome (PMS),which affect theirs’ physical and psychological conditions. However, more and more research evidences indicate that menstrual cycle also affect women’s cognition, social perception, behaviours and so on in recent years. Menstrual cycle affected face preference is one important content of previous researches.Face is a very important external stimulus, which contains gender, age, race and emotion, and these information plays a vital role of human beings social interaction and development. Therefore, there were many researchers pay their attention to the theme that menstrual cycle affected face preference. Previous studies showed that, female in follicular phase preferred more masculinity male faces than female in luteal phase, while female in luteal phase was more dislike male faces which looked unhealthy than those in follicular phase. The hormonal profiles of women in the menstrual cycle and the different evolutionary meaning of female in different menstrual cycle phase played important roles of these phenomenons. Female in follicular phase had high estrogen level and low progesterone level, and with a high fertility at the same time. The evolutionary meaning of this phase was to obtain good genes. Female in luteal phase had high estrogen and progesterone level, and could be considered as a preparatory period for potential pregnancy. The evolutionary meaning of this phase was to protect the next generation. However, whether we can found the results about face preference in the early attention processing or not?Face gender and face attractiveness are two important aspects of face. Hence, we used a classical attentional bias paradigm (dot probe paradigm) to explore different menstrual cycle phase (menses phase, late follicular phase, luteal phase) female’s attentinal bias to faces. There were two studies in our research. The aim of Study 1 was to explore the attentinal bias of female in different menstrual cycle phase. The results showed that female in follicular phase has attentional bias and attentional orienting to male faces, while female in luteal phase has the same attention performance to female faces. In Study 2, we aimed to explore female’s attentional bias to high and low attractive male and female faces in different menstrual cycle phase. The results showed that all subjects had a lager attentional bias and disengaged difficult to female faces than male faces, this result was in accord with female’s own-gender bias. Female in luteal phase had a smaller attentional bias to high and low attractive male face than female in menses phase and female in follicular phase, and female in luteal phase had a larger attentional bias to high and low attractive female faces than male faces. Female in luteal phase existed attentional bias to high and low attractive female faces and existed attention avoid and disengaged easy to high and low attractive male faces. Female in menses phase had a large attention disengaged difficult to all faces than female in luteal phase, and female in menses phase existed attentinal bias to high attractive female faces and existed disengaged difficult to high and low attractive female faces. All our results revealed that menstrual cycle really affected women’s attentional bias to face gender and face attractiveness. These results stem from the different hormone level which changed as the menstrual cycle phase change. What is more important is that our results were according with the sexual strategy theory of evolutionary psychology. Our research expands the content and scope of previous researches. Our study will provide inspiration and reference for the follow-up in academic study and real life.