The role of sex and emotion on emotion perception in artificial faces: An ERP study

• The recognition of sadness was the worst, females identified it more accurately. • Females demonstrated higher global field power at 380–525 ms after stimuli onset. • Negative emotions in artificial faces evoked the strongest brain activity. • Artificial facial expressions induced the lateralization of late positive potential. Sex has a significant impact on the perception of emotional expressions. However, it remains unclear whether sex influences the perception of emotions in artificial faces, which are becoming popular in emotion research. We used an emotion recognition task with FaceGen faces portraying six basic emotions aiming to investigate the effect of sex and emotion on behavioural and electrophysiological parameters. 71 participants performed the task while EEG was recorded. The recognition of sadness was the poorest, however, females recognized sadness better than males. ERP results indicated that fear, disgust, and anger evoked higher amplitudes of late positive potential over the left parietal region compared to neutral expression. Females demonstrated higher values of global field power as compared to males. The interaction between sex and emotion on ERPs was not significant. The results of our study may be valuable for future therapies and research, as it emphasizes possibly distinct processing of emotions and potential sex differences in the recognition of emotional expressions in FaceGen faces.