Graduation Date
Fall 2020
Document Type
Thesis
Program
Master of Arts degree with a major in Psychology, option Academic Research
Committee Chair Name
Dr. Amanda Hahn
Committee Chair Affiliation
HSU Faculty or Staff
Second Committee Member Name
Dr. Ethan Gahtan
Second Committee Member Affiliation
HSU Faculty or Staff
Third Committee Member Name
Dr. Brandilynn Villarreal
Third Committee Member Affiliation
HSU Faculty or Staff
Keywords
Pregnancy, Emotions, Attentional bias, Threat, Hormones
Subject Categories
Psychology
Abstract
The human face provides us with an abundant amount of social and biological information. It is important for us to be able to recognize emotions quickly and accurately, some emotions may be more important and therefore draw more of our attention than others, specifically “threat-relevant” emotions (fear, disgust, anger). To date few studies have investigated how pregnancy impacts emotion recognition abilities. These studies have shown that women have higher accuracy in encoding emotional expressions signaling threat or harm. To determine if pregnancy increases attentional bias to threat, 43 pregnant women and 45 non-pregnant women (controls) performed an emotion recognition task. Although it was predicted that pregnant women would show enhanced sensitivity to threat-relevant emotional displays, no differences were observed between pregnant women and non-pregnant controls. Women were relatively accurate at detecting anger, disgust, happiness, and surprise (all above 75% accuracy). They were relatively less adept at detecting fear and sadness (accuracy between 50% and 75%). Additional analyses did not detect any effect of pregnancy duration (in weeks) on threat-relevant emotion recognition. Our results suggest that there is no difference in emotion recognition ability between pregnant women and non-pregnant women. There was also no main effect of pregnancy status, suggesting that pregnant women were not more sensitive to displays of emotion overall. The current study does not support the prediction that the dramatic increases in both estrogen and progesterone that occur as a function of becoming pregnant increase sensitivity to threat-relevant stimuli.
Citation Style
APA
Recommended Citation
Larsen, Lauren E., "Does pregnancy enhance sensitivity to emotional displays of threat?" (2020). Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects. 454.
https://digitalcommons.humboldt.edu/etd/454