Emotion from a different angle: facial threat signals affect female spatial processing

Making use of facial threat signals requires both emotion and spatial processing – both the emotion and the gaze-target must be identified. Females typically outperform males on emotion recognition tasks, whereas males typically outperform females on spatial processing (SP) tasks. Evolutionary theories suggest that females’ advantage in recognition of threat emotions, in particular, developed due to survival demands; we extend this theory, suggesting that threat localization via SP of gaze direction also promoted survival. Using a novel measure, we tested and found support for the hypothesis that gaze localization would be preferentially enhanced in females for threat compared to nonthreat expressions.