Toronto, Oct 23 (IANS) Women are better than men at differentiating between emotions, especially fear and disgust, according to a new study.
Olivier Collignon and a team from the University of Montreal demonstrated that women are better than men at processing auditory, visual and audiovisual emotions.

While women have long been thought to outperform men in neuro-psychological tests, until now these findings were inconsistent.

To obtain more conclusive evidence, Montreal University researchers did not use photographs to analyse the reaction of subjects. Instead, they hired actors and actresses to simulate fear and disgust.

“Facial movements have been shown to play an important role in the perception of an emotion’s intensity as well as stimulate different parts of the brain used in the treatment of such information,” says Collignon.

As part of their study, the research team exposed subjects to the facial expressions of live actors combined with recordings of human emotions, says a Montreal release.

Participants were asked to quickly categorise emotions they identified as fear or disgust. Emotions were based on auditory stimuli, visual stimuli, followed by compatible audio-visual stimuli and contradictory audio-visual stimuli (i.e. a face that expressed fear with a voice that expressed disgust).

The study found that women were superior in completing assessments and responded quicker when emotions were portrayed by a female rather than a male actor. Compared to men, women were faster at processing facial and multi-sensory expressions.

These findings were published online in Neuropsychologia.