Expression intensity, gender and facial emotion recognition: Women recognize only subtle facial emotions better than men

Two experiments were conducted in order to investigate the effect of expression intensity on gender differences in the recognition of facial emotions. The first experiment compared recognition accuracy between female and male participants when emotional faces were shown with full-blown (100% emotion...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Acta psychologica 2010-11, Vol.135 (3), p.278-283
Main Authors: Hoffmann, Holger, Kessler, Henrik, Eppel, Tobias, Rukavina, Stefanie, Traue, Harald C.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adolescent
Adult
Affectivity. Emotion
Analysis of Variance
Biological and medical sciences
Differential and comparative psychology
Emotions - physiology
Expression intensity
Facial emotion recognition
Facial Expression
Female
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Gender difference
Humans
Male
Middle Aged
Personality. Affectivity
Photic Stimulation
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychophysiology
Recognition (Psychology) - physiology
Sex Characteristics
Sex Factors
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Two experiments were conducted in order to investigate the effect of expression intensity on gender differences in the recognition of facial emotions. The first experiment compared recognition accuracy between female and male participants when emotional faces were shown with full-blown (100% emotional content) or subtle expressiveness (50%). In a second experiment more finely grained analyses were applied in order to measure recognition accuracy as a function of expression intensity (40%–100%). The results show that although women were more accurate than men in recognizing subtle facial displays of emotion, there was no difference between male and female participants when recognizing highly expressive stimuli.
ISSN:0001-6918
1873-6297
DOI:10.1016/j.actpsy.2010.07.012