Emotional abilities and cortical activation during emotional information processing

In the physiological study of cognitive intelligence there is sound evidence of a more efficient use of the brain in brighter individuals (the neural efficiency hypothesis). However, scarcely anything is known with respect to physiological correlates of emotional abilities. To overcome this limitation, we analyzed the relationship between interpersonal emotional management abilities (EMA) and the extent of event-related desynchronization (ERD) in the EEG during the performance of an emotional face processing task (and a control task) in a sample of 65 participants (31 males, 34 females) with low (n = 31) versus high (n = 34) emotional management abilities. In the emotional face processing task (judging the equivalence of two simultaneously presented facial emotions), significant ERD-differences between the EMA-groups (with a larger amount of ERD in the low versus high EMA-group) were found in both sexes. In the control task (requiring participants to judge the equivalence of the faces’ sex without considering their emotional expressions), an inverse EMA-activation relationship was found only in men, but not in women. Overall, the results indicate that the neural efficiency phenomenon is not restricted to the cognitive ability domain but might also play an important role in the emotional ability domain.