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Abstract
Hormonal cycle modulates arousal circuitry. Animal experiments suggested that progesterone enhanced fear-potentiated startle. At present, direct electrophysiological evidence of a gender difference in novel and unpredictive stimuli is still sparse. Ten men and 23 women at one of two different stages of the menstrual cycle (menses phase, WM, and luteal phase, WL) were examined for event-related potential evidence of attention allocation in the oddball task phase (OTP) and predictive task phase (PTP). We used two tones, 1 kHz 80% as standard stimuli and 2 kHz 20%, as novel stimuli presented randomly in OTP. In PTP, every novel stimuli fixed followed a white noise, but 1 kHz tones never followed white noise. The results showed: (1) In OTP, the P3 amplitude in the WL group during the 350–400-ms time window was higher than that of the other two groups. (2) In PTP, no difference was observed between the groups with respect to the amplitude of contingent negative variation during the 1080–1180 ms and 1320–1360 ms time windows. Thus, it is concluded that women in WL present modulated autonomic arousal, but no difference to predictive negative stimuli than women in WM and men.
Acknowledgements
Financial support for this study was provided by the National Natural Science Funds. The authors declare that, except for income received from the primary employer, they report no biomedical financial interests or potential conflicts of interest. Dr. Chen Qu has received compensation for activities related to teaching and editing that pose no conflicts of interest. The authors would like to thank the professional editors of www.textchek.com.