The Effects of Attributed Gender on Adult Emotion Perception

Abstract

Adults' gender stereotypes of emotion have been investigated with a variety of methods, but those methods do not provide a strong test of the stereotype: The participants were presented only with cues to the gender or to the emotion; or when both cues were available, gender was confounded with poser. This study examined the effects of attributed gender on adults' perception of emotion in facial expressions and stories when presented with clear versus ambiguous cues to both emotion and gender. College students (n = 90) were first asked to label the emotion of either a man (Timothy) or a woman (Sophia) with identical prototypical and “mixed” facial expressions and, separately, to Free Label stories about emotions. The same students were then to choose from a list of ten emotion labels the one that best described the protagonist's emotion for the same stimuli. Results showed that, for ambiguous cues to emotion, participants labeled facial expressions according to gender stereotypes. However, for the stimuli with clear cues to both emotion and gender of the poser, a reverse effect of gender stereotypes was observed for anger, fear, shame, and compassion due to an expectancy violation.