Pregnant women able to better distinguish emotions in others

December 15, 2009 by Shawn Douglas
Filed under: News, Pregnancy

Pregnant women may be better at reading the emotions on people’s faces, especially late in the pregnancy.

While hormonal changes and mood swings often occur during pregnancy, new research reveals that women may also have the ability to better read the emotions on others faces while pregnant.

Researchers at the University of Bristol in the U.K. asked 76 women in the early stages of pregnancy to identify the emotion on 60 computer-generated faces. The process was repeated later in the pregnancy, around week 34.

Researchers conducting the study, published in the journal Hormones and Behavior found that during both the early and late stages of pregnancy, women were equally able to identify faces showing happiness and surprise. Yet women were more sensitive to and accurate at gauging emotions like fear, anger and disgust later in pregnancy.

“Enhanced ability to encode emotional faces during late pregnancy may be an evolutionary [adaptation] to prepare women for the protective and nurturing demands of motherhood by increasing their general emotional sensitivity and their vigilance towards emotional signals of threat, aggression and contagion,” the study authors said.

Dr. Rebecca Pearson, one of the authors, pointed out that for women suffering from anxiety, the sense may be amplified. While pregnant women aren’t inherently anxious, those that suffer from anxiety disorders “might interpret negative or emotional things around them in a slightly more sensitive way,” she said.

Previous studies have analyzed women’s menstrual cycles and how women perceive emotions in people’s faces. Those studies have suggested that on days when levels of the hormone progesterone are higher, women are better able to identify fear and disgust. Dr. Pearson and her team wanted to test pregnant women as they typically experience a spike in progesterone during late pregnancy.

Additional inspiration for the research came from the work of Ben Jones and his team at the Face Research Lab at the University of Aberdeen. Some of the work at the lab has focused on how hormonal fluctuations affect women’s ability to read faces.