Emotion and Gender Typicality Cue Sexual Orientation Differently in Women and Men

R. Thora Bjornsdottir,Nicholas O. Rule

doi:10.1007/s10508-020-01700-3

R. Thora Bjornsdottir, Nicholas O. Rule

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-020-01700-3

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Abstract

Heterosexual individuals tend to look and act more typical for their gender compared to gay and lesbian individuals, and people use this information to infer sexual orientation. Consistent with stereotypes associating happy expressions with femininity, previous work found that gay men displayed more happiness than straight men—a difference that perceivers used, independent of gender typicality, to judge sexual orientation. Here, we extended this to judgments of women’s sexual orientation. Like the gender-inversion stereotypes applied to men, participants perceived women’s faces manipulated to look angry as more likely to be lesbians; however, emotional expressions largely did not distinguish the faces of actual lesbian and straight women. Compared to men’s faces, women’s faces varied less in their emotional expression (appearing invariably positive) but varied more in gender typicality. These differences align with gender role expectations requiring the expression of positive emotion by women and prohibiting the expression of femininity by men. More important, greater variance within gender typicality and emotion facilitates their respective utility for distinguishing sexual orientation from facial appearance. These findings thus provide the first evidence for contrasting cues to women’s and men’s sexual orientation and suggest that gender norms may uniquely shape how men and women reveal their sexual orientation.

Highlights

Impressions of another person’s sexual orientation have important downstream consequences for how people perceive and behave towards others
We tested whether emotion cues might contribute to sexual orientation judgments independently of gender typicality cues. We tested this using two separate stimulus sets: neutral photographs taken in the laboratory and photographs obtained from online dating profiles. These results showed that angry-looking women seem more likely to be lesbian than neutral or happy-looking women, demonstrating the utilization of anger as a cue in inferring women’s sexual orientation
The masculinity and femininity mean ratings strongly correlated [r(62) = − .95; r(98) = − .94], so we likewise averaged femininity and reverse-scored masculinity into a single gender typicality score for each target. We entered these scores into a target-level path model in which emotion and gender typicality predicted perceived sexual orientation, which subsequently predicted actual sexual orientation

Summary

Introduction

Impressions of another person’s sexual orientation have important downstream consequences for how people perceive and behave towards others. Despite the obvious benefits that knowing someone’s sexual orientation can afford for mate selection and group solidarity, perceptions of sexual orientation influence life outcomes such as hiring decisions (e.g., Gross, Green, Storck, & Vanyur, 1980; Rule, Bjornsdottir, Tskhay, & Ambady, 2016). Such ramifications emphasize the value of understanding how people form impressions of sexual orientation. As that work only considered men, we thought it important to build upon its findings to test how emotion might cue sexual orientation in women, for whom expectations about gender and emotion differ markedly from men

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