Enhanced Sensitivity To Rare, Emotion-irrelevant Stimuli In Gender And Gender Role:Neural Correlates

The ability to detect unusual events is fundamental for adapting to a rapidly changing environment and ensuring an organism’s survival. Rare event happening is sudden, meaning unpredictable and unusual, to individuals. Consequently, the human is sensitive to rare events so that these events are processed rapidly in the brain. Though females are equipped with enhanced sensitivity to rare stimuli compared to males. The greater sensitivity of females toward rare events may be an evolutionary adaptation that enhances females’abilities to cope with environmental accidents, given their physiological vulnerabilities. But the physiological gender different in gender roles, the human development process has a significant impact on society culture. Therefore, studies should take into account the factor of gender role difference in rare stimulus processing. So it is necessary to adopt oddball paradigm processing rare stimulus to investigate effect of gender roles and gender relations.First of all, in order to detect the distribution of the contemporary college students’ gender roles, Experiment one we used Dian Zhi Liu 《college students’ gender role scale》(CSRI-50) as measuring tools, a total of437questionnaires to survey. According to the statistical, sample of gender role type ratio from high to low in turn for Androgynous, traditional sex role, undifferentiated. Research finding the proportion of Masculinity among males was higher than that among females, and the proportion of Femininity among females was higher than that in males, indicating the continuing influence of the traditional culture. Also the Androgynous increased proportionally. Because Androgynous personality which the advantages of both males and females’s personality, so a further sign of college students’ gender roles in the development of optimization. While the worst Undifferentiated increased proportionally, in this study represents a significant proportion in the total sample should be worthy of attention and vigilance.Experiment two, by 《college students’ gender role scale》 screening of64college students as a paid participant, including females masculinity and femininity each16subjects, males masculinity and femininity subjects is16. Experiment using oddball paradigm, required subjects as soon as possible to the target stimulus press the blank space key reactions, while the standard stimulus and rare stimulus don’t need button, three kinds of stimulation random. Repeated measurement variance analysis method is adopted, the participants in factors to stimulate the type (2levels:standard, rare stimulus) and electrode point (15points); Subjects between the factors of gender (female and male), gender roles (Femininity and Masculinity).Stimulus pictures are all from the Chinese affective picture system (CAPS) neutral pictures. At the same time the high temporal resolution of ERP technology for visual rare stimulus effects of gender roles in the process of exploring. Behavior found that in gender roles femininity to target stimulation reaction were significantly longer than the masculinity; male’s masculinity shorter than male femininity reaction time, female’s masculinity reaction target stimuli significantly longer than male’s masculinity. ERP results show that a significant role in frontal zone and the central position of N1wave, and found that the electrode point*gender*stimulus type significant interaction, and the interaction of gender and gender role. On the analysis of P2waves found females more induced polarized wave compared to males, suggests that the attention of females than males will allocate more resources to carry on the processing deviation stimulation. But also found that the electrode point*stimulus type*gender roles interact significantly, masculinity than femininity has a bigger wave of rare-standard difference; susceptibility of rare stimulus was much more strongly. In P3wave analysis, found that the stimulus of parietal lobes significant electrode point*stimulus type*gender roles of interaction, masculinity at this stage to show greater positive wave than femininity, visible individual of different gender roles in the processing of emotion-irrelevant stimulation does exist difference.Overall, different gender roles of the individual events in the cognitive processing way are different, Masculinity than Femininity have a higher susceptibility to the rare stimulus that it allocates more attention and cognitive resources to rare stimulation for processing. N1, P2, P3wave were detected significant interaction of gender and gender role, means gender and gender role mutual affects an individual’s susceptibility to the rare stimulus, these are accord with the experiment. So, after examining the rare of cognitive processing also need to consider when there is the influence of individual differences. Different gender roles on rare stimulus have different sensitivity and susceptibility.