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New Research, Old Problems: Methodological and Ethical Issues in fMRI Research Examining Sex/Gender Differences in Emotion Processing

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Abstract

Neuroscience research examining sex/gender differences aims to explain behavioral differences between men and women in terms of differences in their brains. Historically, this research has used ad hoc methods and has been conducted explicitly in order to show that prevailing gender roles were dictated by biology. I examine contemporary fMRI research on sex/gender differences in emotion processing and argue that it, too, both uses problematic methods and, in doing so, reinforces gender stereotypes.

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Notes

  1. I use the term sex/gender in order to avoid connotations that the research I discuss views any differences between men and women as being either innate (sex differences) or the result of socialization (gender differences). Neuroimaging researchers generally tend to refrain from speculating on the causes of any differences they find. The compound term also reflects the fact that, in practice, scientists tend to use the terms “sex” and “gender” interchangeably.

  2. And when it is used for these purposes, it is not by scientists (see, e.g. [3]).

  3. Although imaging researchers assume that there are common patterns of activity occurring in all people who perform a particular task, there is an increasing recognition that individual variability in brain activity is important and must be taken into account [11].

  4. The ability of subtraction techniques to provide information about cognitive functions has been criticized (e.g. [1215]). These analyses have been recently defended by Adina Roskies [16, 17] who shows that, while not perfect, such analyses are informative.

  5. In cases where whole-brain analyses are supplemented with ROI analyses, the ROI analyses may use a lower threshold for statistical significance (in addition to correcting only for the number of statistical tests being done in the ROI). This is because the ROIs have been hypothesized to show between-group differences prior to running the experiment.

  6. The use of within-group analyses is also particularly common in studies examining sex/gender differences in language processing. See [26] for a good discussion of the problems with this literature. Recently, Nieuwenhius et al. have shown that studies in many areas of neuroscience, not just neuroimaging, rely on within-group analyses when they should be directly comparing groups [27].

  7. In practice, neuroimaging researchers would be more cautious than to say that their results explain anything. They would be much more likely to hypothesize that they will find such activity differences and to interpret the differences by saying they “may be associated with” the relevant behavioral differences, rather than that they explain the behavioral differences. I take it, though that the ultimate, long-term, goal of neuroimaging research is to explain behavioral differences in terms of neural differences, despite the limits of any particular study.

  8. Two possible reasons for the use of different cognitive and neural processes are (1) to compensate for differences in brain structure that arise due to exposure to different hormone levels during fetal development [31] and (2) because male and female children are socialized differently and thus learn to handle emotions differently [32, 33].

  9. A detailed discussion of the types of alternative analytic techniques available to neuroimaging researchers, and of their relative strength and merit, is beyond the scope of this paper. For further discussion of the theoretical issues pertaining to different analyses. (See, for example, [3436] and the papers in [37]). A discussion of questions about technical issues and applications can be found in [3539].

  10. Similarly, Adina Roskies [46] warns against taking neuroimages to be like photographs; the actual “inferential distance” between the image and the phenomenon being examined is much greater than it appears. Meynell [47] expands on Roskies’s analysis specifically with regard to neuroimaging research investigating sex/gender differences.

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Acknowledgements

Work on this paper was supported by a fellowship from the Old Dominion University Office of Research. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the New Scholars in Bioethics (NSIB) First Annual Symposium and I would like to thank the participants - Danielle Bromwich, Joseph Millum, Marika Warren, Michael Garnett and Kirstin Borgerson - for their valuable feedback.

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Correspondence to Robyn Bluhm.

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Bluhm, R. New Research, Old Problems: Methodological and Ethical Issues in fMRI Research Examining Sex/Gender Differences in Emotion Processing. Neuroethics 6, 319–330 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12152-011-9143-3

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