Covering our faces with masks, due to COVID-19 pandemic safety regulations, we can no longer fully rely on the social signals we are used to. We have to read what’s between the lines. This is already difficult for healthy individuals, but may be particularly challenging for individuals with neuropsychiatric conditions.

Our main goal was to examine (i) whether capabilities in body and face language reading are connected to each other in healthy females and males; and (ii) whether capabilities to body/face language reading are related to other social abilities.

Healthy females and males accomplished a task with point-light body motion portraying angry and neutral locomotion along with a task with point-light faces expressing happiness and angriness. They had to infer emotional content of displays. As a control condition, perceivers were administered with the RMET-M (Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test, Modified) with static images.

Females excelled on inferring emotions from body locomotion. Moreover, only in females, inferring emotions from body and face were firmly linked, whereas in males, face reading was connected to performance on the RMET-M.

The outcome points to gender-specific modes in social cognition: females rely upon merely dynamic cues in facial and bodily displays, whereas males most likely trust configural information. The findings are of value for investigation of face/body language reading in neuropsychiatric conditions, most of which are gender specific.

No significant relationships.

Research on face tuning is of particular relevance during the Covid-19 pandemic leading to social isolation and anxiety, but also requiring social integrity. Face sensitivity represents an essential component of social competence. This ability is aberrant in most neuropsychiatric conditions. Studies in typically developing individuals enable to develop new tools for examination and better understanding non-verbal social cognition in neuropsychiatry.

Here we used a novel set of Face-n-Thing images to address the following issues: (i) whether the ability to seeing faces in non-face images (face pareidolia) is affected by gender; and (ii) whether it is altered with changing display orientation. The main advantage of Face-n-Thing images is that face tuning occurs without being explicitly fostered by familiar elements.

A newly developed Face-n-Thing task, on which images were shown either with canonical upright orientation or inverted 180º in the image plane, was administered to healthy females and males. On each trial, they have to indicate whether they have a face impression.

Face impression was substantially impeded by display inversion in both males and females. With upright display orientation, no gender differences were found, whereas with inversion, Face-n-Thing images elicited face impression in females significantly more often.

The findings open a way for examination of face sensitivity and underwriting brain networks in neuropsychiatric conditions, most of which are gender-specific. Display inversion represents a proper control for face tuning in neuroimaging studies. Gender differences should be taken into account when conceiving studies in neuropsychiatric populations.

No significant relationships.