Stereotypes and prejudice affect the recognition of emotional body postures.

Abstract

Most research on emotion recognition focuses on facial expressions. However, people communicate emotional information through bodily cues as well. Prior research on facial expressions has demonstrated that emotion recognition is modulated by top-down processes. Here, we tested whether this top-down modulation generalizes to the recognition of emotions from body postures. We report three studies demonstrating that stereotypes and prejudice about men and women may affect how fast people classify various emotional body postures. Our results suggest that gender cues activate gender associations, which affect the recognition of emotions from body postures in a top-down fashion. (PsycINFO Database Record

Evaluations versus stereotypes in emotion recognition: a replication and extension of Craig and Lipp’s (2018) study on facial age cues

“…Finally, the present research has implications for experimental design. Our studies converge with the idea that the task context is crucial in activating stereotype or evaluative associations (Bijlstra et al, 2010(Bijlstra et al, , 2018Wittenbrink et al, 2001). The kind of expectations that people use, either evaluation-or stereotype-based expectations, depend on whether valence differences are salient within the context.…”

“…Stereotype associations have only been found to affect emotion recognition when emotions in a recognition task do not differ in valence, i.e. two negative emotional expressions (single-valence conditions; Bijlstra et al, 2010;Bijlstra, Holland, Dotsch, Hugenberg, & Wigboldus, 2014;Bijlstra, Holland, Dotsch, & Wigboldus, 2018). This is illustrated in our previous work (Bijlstra et al, 2010) by participants' recognition speed regarding sad male and female faces.…”

“…race, age, gender, ethnicity) and emotions (happiness vs. anger, sadness, fear, and negative surprise) these studies contributed a lot to our understanding of the role of prejudice in emotion perception. Research demonstrating stereotype rather than prejudice effects in emotion recognition has hardly been conducted and was restricted to stereotypes related to gender and ethnicity (Bijlstra et al, 2010(Bijlstra et al, , 2014(Bijlstra et al, , 2018. We predicted that stereotypes related to age, could be an additional social category to test the generalisability of this effect.…”

“…In sum, although Craig and Lipp (2018a) provided evidence for evaluative associations affecting emotion recognition, effects of age stereotypes on emotion recognition remain as yet untested, simply because their dual-valence task context was not suitable to test possible effects of stereotype associations. Applying the logic of prior single-valence context findings (Bijlstra et al, 2010(Bijlstra et al, , 2014(Bijlstra et al, , 2018 to the current social categories enables us to test whether emotion recognition on young and old faces is indeed affected by "anger-young" and "sadness-old" stereotypes. In the current research, we designed two emotion recognition studies to (1) replicate the impact of age-related evaluative associations using a dual-valence task context and (2) provide a first test of possible age stereotype effects using a single-valence task context.…”

Thin-Slice Judgments of Children’s Social Status and Behavior

“…Finally, we took the sex of the child being observed into account. Research has shown that in men, sadness, angry facial expressions are more easily recognized (Bijlstra et al, 2010), whereas in women positive emotions and body postures are more easily recognized (Bijlstra et al, 2010;Bijlstra et al, 2019). It is therefore possible that judges are more likely to see negative behavior in boys, and positive social behavior in girls, affecting the accuracy of their judgment.…”