Do We Expect Women to Look Happier Than They Are? A Test of Gender-Dependent Perceptual Correction

Abstract

Feminine facial features enhance the expressive cues associated with happiness but not sadness. This makes a woman look happier than a man even when their smiles have the same intensity. So, to correctly infer the actual happiness of a woman, one would have to subtract the effect of these facial features. We hypothesised that our perceptual system would apply this subtraction for women, but not for men. This implies that this female-specific subtraction would cause one to infer a man to be happier than a woman if both are matched for facial appearance and expression intensity. We tested this using androgynous virtual faces with equal expression intensity. As predicted, happy men were inferred to be happier than happy women, but sad men were not inferred to be sadder than sad women, supporting our hypothesis of a gender- and emotion-specific perceptual correction.

Stereotypes and Structure in the Interaction between Facial Emotional Expression and Sex Characteristics

“…hair/clothes), a role of stereotypes on emotion perception is also observed, however in these studies, the influence of stereotypes results in patterns opposite to the stereotype (e.g. perception of apparent male faces as happier; Hess, Adams, & Kleck, 2004;Steephen, Mehta, & Bapi, 2018). Across these studies, there is evidence for a stereotypic association between men and anger and women and happiness, though the influence of these stereotypes does not always lead to facilitated recognition of these categories.…”

“…Apparent men were rated as more often showing happiness, and surprise (Hess, Adams, & Kleck, 2004). Steephen, Mehta, and Bapi (2018), also found that androgynous faces with male haircuts were perceived as happier than the same faces with female haircuts. Initially, this pattern is perhaps opposite to what we would predict given the stereotype account; however, as facial structure was matched in these studies, it was proposed that violating the expectation that women should be happy (and men angry) accounted for this role of face sex on emotion perception.…”

Preliminary Study of the Perception of Emotions Expressed by Virtual Agents in the Context of Parkinson's Disease

“…We found an interaction effect between emotion and avatar gender (F(1,1) = 9.41, p = 0.0002). Joy and anger were better recognized with the male avatar (as reported for joy in [20]). Sadness was better recognized with the female avatar.…”

Understanding and Mitigating Annotation Bias in Facial Expression Recognition

“…In another line of research, studies have shown that women look happier than men [75] and that people are faster and more accurate at detecting angry expressions on male faces and happy expressions on female faces [5]. As a result, correction of the annotations is necessary [75].…”

“…In the context of facial expression recognition, studies in psychology have shown that human observers are more likely to perceive women's faces as happier than men's faces even when their smiles have the same intensity [75], and it is believed that raters hold cultural stereotypes and that these stereotypes influence the judgment of emotions [31,46]. We hypothesize that such bias is present in many in-the-wild expression datasets whose labels are annotated by non-experts.…”