Sex-dependent modulation of activity in the neural networks engaged during emotional speech comprehension

Studies using event related potentials have shown that men are more likely than women to rely on semantic cues when understanding emotional speech. In a previous functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) study, using an affective sentence classification task, we were able to separate areas involved in semantic processing and areas involved in the processing of affective prosody (Beaucousin et al., 2007). Here we searched for sex-related differences in the neural networks active during emotional speech processing in groups of men and women. The ortholinguistic abilities of the participants did not differ when evaluated with a large battery of tests. Although the neural networks engaged by men and women during emotional sentence classification were largely overlapping, sex-dependent modulations were detected during emotional sentence classification, but not during grammatical sentence classification. Greater activity was observed in men, compared with women, in inferior frontal cortical areas involved in emotional labeling and in attentional areas. In conclusion, at equivalent linguistic abilities and performances, men activate semantic and attentional cortical areas to a larger extent than women during emotional speech processing.

Research highlights
► According to studies using event related potentials, when understanding emotional speech, men are more likely than women to rely on semantic cues.
► Using fMRI, we searched for sex-related differences in the neural networks active during emotional speech processing in groups of men and women. Both groups had equivalent verbal abilities.
► Sex-dependent modulations of brain activity were observed during emotional sentence classification but not during grammatical sentence classification in several cortical areas.
► Greater activity in men compared with women was found in inferior frontal cortical areas involved in emotional labeling as well as in attentional areas.