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Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 2006 1(2):149-157; doi:10.1093/scan/nsl020
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© The Author (2006). Published by Oxford University Press. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Perceiving an opponent's loss: gender-related differences in the medial-frontal negativity

Hirokata Fukushima1 and Kazuo Hiraki1,2

1Department of General Systems Studies, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and 2Interfaculty Initiative in Information Studies, The University of Tokyo, 3-8-1 Komaba, Meguro-ku, Tokyo 153-8902, Japan

Along with expanding the understanding of the human ‘social brain’, a new challenge for neuroscience is to elucidate the nature of individual differences in social competence. Here we report a neural index of gender difference in empathy-related processing in a complex social situation. Using electroencephalography, we measured the neural activity of perceptions to one's own and another's monetary gain or loss, while individuals played a ‘competitive’ two-person gambling game, in which one's monetary gain resulted in the other's loss. The medial-frontal negativity (MFN), a component within 300 ms latency reflecting an emotional categorization of the event, showed a significant gender difference in perceiving an opponent's, but not a self-performed outcome. When females perceive the opponent's outcomes, the MFN was elicited, indicating that another's loss was categorized as negative, even though it resulted in a benefit to them. On the contrary, the males did not elicit discernable MFN to the opponent's outcomes. Together with the fact that the affect score has a negative linear correlation with the MFN, this indicated that the MFN was sensitive to socio-emotional processing. These results suggest that individual differences in complex social behavior result from rapid neural activity in response to external stimuli.

Keywords: empathy; gender difference; competition; gambling task; event-related potentials (ERPs)

Correspondence should be addressed to: Hirokata Fukushima, E-mail: hirof{at}ardbeg.c.u-tokyo.ac.jp and Kazuo Hiraki, E-mail: khiraki{at}idea.c.u-tokyo.ac.jp


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