Abstract

Female show poorer decision-making performance when compared with male in the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT). Evidence suggests this could be related to a stronger emotional reaction during punishments, which negatively affect female’s risky decision-making performance. Recent evidence shows a gender specific down-regulation of negative emotions (NE) in which women seems to down-regulate NE in a non-automatic fashion activating reward related regions. Because humor effectively increase reward related activity, we expected humor to down-regulate the women´s NE of punishment during IGT thus increasing decision-making performance. EEG was recorded from female & male participants exposed to either humorous or non-humorous short films before their decisions were made. IGT performance & feedback related negativity (fRN) were measured. Preliminary data show a statistical difference in IGT performance in male & females, obtaining more long-term advantageous decisions during the humorous condition when compared with non-humorous condition. Additionally, we observed a significant decrease in fRN amplitude in females during the humorous condition, which has been related in previous studies with changes in emotional valence.