Girls and Boys Just See Things Differently
By Robin Foster

(HealthScoutNews) -- Boys and girls use different parts of their brains to recognize faces and facial emotions, and that finding could lead to better treatments for stroke, says the author of a new study.

When researchers at the State University of New York's School of Medicine, in Buffalo, asked 35 prepubescent boys and girls to pick out faces and identify facial expressions, brain scans showed the boys used their right hemisphere while the girls favored their left hemisphere. "When boys look at faces, they look at the face as a whole. Girls see fine details," says lead study author D. Erik Everhart.

That suggests that men and women who suffer strokes should receive different treatments, depending on where the brain damage occurs, says Everhart who is now at East Carolina University, in Greenville, N.C.

In cases of brain damage or stroke in which victims lose the ability to read faces and emotions, women may have an advantage when recovering because they can better detect fine changes in facial expressions, Everhart says.

But he says further studies are needed: "We're just scratching the surface here."

"It's an exciting area of research, but at this point this is a little bit of a stretch to say it will lead to new paradigms of treatment," says Dr. Mark Alberts, director of the Stroke Program at Northwestern University Medical School in Chicago.

Alberts says, "One of the challenges with strokes typically is to look at the severity of deficits" including the loss of speech and the inability to walk or see correctly. The loss of the ability to read faces is not considered a major deficit, although it might account for some of the depression doctors find with stroke patients, he says.

In the study, Everhart and his colleagues asked 17 boys and 18 girls, ages 8 to 11, to perform two tasks: to recognize a face they had seen previously on three slides and to match facial expressions from a set of 24 slides. Researchers used an electroencephalography to measure the children's brain activity during the first task. For the second task, they tallied the children's accuracy and response times.

Researchers found the boys favored the right side of their brains, where spatial and global thinking occur, while the girls used more of their left brains, where local, detailed thinking occurs. Most interesting, says Everhart, is that the boys and girls did equally well using different neuronal systems to do the same thing.

The findings appear in the July issue of Neuropsychology.

Everhart says a stroke on the left side affects language and is very noticeable, but a stroke on the right side might show symptoms, like perception deficits, that are not detected as easily.

He says, "Families will say there's something different about this person," but they won't be able to pinpoint the problem. Particularly with men, that could be a loss of the ability to read faces and emotions, he says.

Everhart says an appropriate therapy could make the difference in recovery.

"It's possible to help a person compensate, to focus on the details of the face," he says.

What To Do: Read about how face blindness can affect a person's emotional life. And check this ABCNews story about how a smile can fool you.

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