Joe Walsh

Sex differences in how parents recognise and respond to pain communication.

A significant body of literature has shown that there are sex differences in how we recognise and respond to affective information communicated by other people. However, until recently the majority of this research was focused on the facial expression of traditional “core emotions”. In this talk, I will broaden our understanding of affect and emotion to include pain, first talking about how we communicate pain through facial expression as well as other nonverbal channels, before considering one area in which sex differences in this communication are particularly important: Parent’s ability to identify and respond to children’s pain signals.