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% 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.
Hoffmann
Holger
H
University Clinic for Psychosomatic Medicine and Psychotherapy, Ulm, Germany. holger.hoffmann@uni-ulm.de
Kessler
Henrik
H
Eppel
Tobias
T
Rukavina
Stefanie
S
Traue
Harald C
HC
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology*; D005149:Facial Expression; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D021641:Recognition, Psychology / Q000502:physiology*; D012727:Sex Characteristics; D012737:Sex Factors