RT journal article
T1 Menstrual cycle and exogenous attention toward emotional expressions
A1 Álvarez, Fátima
A1 Fernández‑Folgueiras, Uxía
A1 Méndez Bertolo, Constantino José
A1 Kessel, Dominique
A2 Psicología
K1 Exogenous attention
K1 Menstrual cycle
K1 Emotion
K1 ERP
K1 Premenstrual syndrome
AB Several studies suggest that the menstrual cycle affects emotional processing. However, these results may be biased by including women with premenstrual syndrome (PMS) in the samples. PMS is characterized by negative emotional symptomatology, such as depression and/or anxiety, during the luteal phase. This study aimed to explore the modulation of exogenous attention to emotional facial expressions as a function of the menstrual cycle in women without PMS. For this purpose, 55 women were selected (from an original volunteer sample of 790) according to rigorous exclusion criteria. Happy, angry, and neutral faces were presented as distractors, while both behavioral performance in a perceptual task and event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded. This task was applied during both phases of the menstrual cycle (luteal and follicular, counterbalanced), and pre-menstrual symptomatology was monitored daily. Traditional and Bayesian ANOVAs on behavioral data (reaction times and errors in the task) and ERP indices (P1, N170, N2, and LPP amplitudes) confirmed the expected lack of an interaction of phase and emotion. Taken together, these results indicate that women free of PMS present steady exogenous attention levels to emotionally positive and negative stimuli regardless of the menstrual phase.
PB ELSEVIER
SN 1095-6867
YR 2022
FD 2022-11
LK http://hdl.handle.net/10498/28788
UL http://hdl.handle.net/10498/28788
LA eng
DS Repositorio Institucional de la Universidad de Cádiz
RD 12-nov-2026