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Abstract:
The androgen derivative androstadienone (AND) is a substance found in human sweat and thus may act as human chemosignal. AND has been studied with respect to effects on mood states, attractiveness ratings, physiological and neural activation. With the current experiment, we aimed to explore in which way AND affects interference processing during an emotional Stroop task, which used human faces as target and emotional
words as distractor stimuli. This was complemented by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to unravel the neural mechanism of AND-action. Based on previous accounts
we expected AND to increase neural activation in areas commonly implicated in evaluation of emotional face processing and to change neural activation in brain regions
linked to interference processing. For this aim, a total of 80 healthy individuals (31 users of oral contraceptives, 21 luteal women) were tested twice on two consecutive days with an emotional Stroop task using fMRI. Our results suggest that AND increases interference processing in brain areas that are heavily recruited during conflict resolution. At the same time, correlation analyses revealed that this neural interference processing was paralleled by higher behavioural costs (reaction times) with higher interference related activation. Furthermore, AND elicited higher activation in regions implicated in emotional face processing including right fusiform gyrus, inferior frontal gyrus and dorsomedial cortex. In this connection, neural activation was not coupled to behavioural outcome. Furthermore, despite previous accounts of increased hypothalamic activation under AND, we were not able to
replicate this finding and discuss possible reasons for this discrepancy. To conclude, AND increased neural interference and emotion processing. Furthermore, when correlating neural and behavioural outcome a coupling emerged for interference
processing suggesting higher costs in resolving emotional conflicts with stronger interference-related brain activation under AND.
