Do Men Conform More Than Women in the Recognition and Labeling of Emotions?

Abstract

Abstract:The study focuses on differences between women and men in recognizing negative emotions from facial expressions a nd the conformity of women and men while labeling the emotions. Previous research has indicated that women conform more than men when the stimuli used are more comprehensible for men. This research seeks to establish whether this phenomenon can be observed when the stimuli are more comprehensible to women. In this study, 24 women and 25 men labeled the facial expressions of negative emotions, first in private and subsequently in a group with four confederates. In private, women were more successful than men in recognizing facial expressions. However, no differences were observed between women and men in respect to conformity while being in a group. The results show that the displaying of emotions is a gender specific stimulus that does not affect conformity.

An exploratory study of the effect of age and gender on face scanning during affect recognition in immersive virtual reality

“…In terms of gender, earlier studies have reported an advantage of women in emotion recognition 19 , and that they pay more attention to the eyes than men, who pay more attention to the mouth than women do (morph of static pictures 20 , static pictures 15 ). Another study confirmed the dominance of women over men in labeling emotions, but a non-significant difference was found in tagging negative emotions 21 . Women’s superiority in emotion recognition seems to be maintained across aging 17 .…”