Evolutionary perspective on the recognition of basic facial emotions in childhood and youth

LÓPEZ MORALES, HERNÁN; ZABALETTA, VERÓNICA; VIVAS, LETICIA; LÓPEZ, MARCELA; ZABALA, LUCÍA

Buenos Aires

Congreso; World Congress on Brain, Behavior and Emotions; 2016

Introduction: From evolutionary perspective, the recognition of basic emotions has been considered as a component of the phylogenetic repertory in human. It has an adaptive value in the regulation of social behaviour and contributes to the interpretation of the messages and actions of others, becoming a behavioural phenotype which identifies our specie. The basic emotions would be an adaptive way of dealing with several contexts, but whose content has been a constant through the history of the specie. The differences between men and women could be due to various contextual settings for each sex in their evolutionary. Aim: Establish whether there are differences in the recognition of basic emotions between men and women on child and youth population. Method: a digitized adaptation of Test Pictures of Facial Affects was administered to a sample of 140 child and youth from 9 to 18. Successes and response times were measured. Descriptive and non-parametric inferential analysis were applied to determine mean difference. Results: Significant differences in the recognition of disgust were found (p=.000), in favor to women. Also, a superior mean in the recognition of fear was observed in men, but without statistical significance. In the comparison of response times, significant differences in favor to women in recognition of joy (p = .034) and surprise (p = .012) were observed. Conclusions: the female superiority in emotional recognition may arise from the almost universal responsibility of women to raise children, based on the hypothesis of consolidation of the breeding-mother attachment (justifying best performance on the recognition of positive emotions such as joy and surprise, both capable of producing safe attachment with the breeding), and a hypothesis of the safety of breeding to threats, which would justify the importance of the recognition of disgust as a way to communicate the existence of the non-edible food, considering the ancestral female role in harvest. From this perspective, the hunter role of men would make them more suitable for emotion recognition in aggressive contexts, such as anger and fear. This hypothesis has not been confirmed by data, supposing the amplification of female role in the actual context may have provoked the need to develop adaptive mechanisms in order to improve emotional recognition, minimizing the differences between men and women.