Abstract
Body motion is a rich source of information for social cognition. However, gender effects in body language reading are largely unknown. Here we investigated whether, and, if so, how recognition of emotional expressions revealed by body motion is gender dependent. To this end, females and males were presented with point-light displays portraying knocking at a door performed with different emotional expressions. The findings show that gender affects accuracy rather than speed of body language reading. This effect, however, is modulated by emotional content of actions: males surpass in recognition accuracy of happy actions, whereas females tend to excel in recognition of hostile angry knocking. Advantage of women in recognition accuracy of neutral actions suggests that females are better tuned to the lack of emotional content in body actions. The study provides novel insights into understanding of gender effects in body language reading, and helps to shed light on gender vulnerability to neuropsychiatric and neurodevelopmental impairments in visual social cognition.
Highlights
Body language reading is of immense importance for adaptive social behavior and non-verbal communication
Females and males were presented with point-light displays portraying knocking at a door performed with different emotional expressions.The findings show that gender affects accuracy rather than speed of body language reading
Individual number of correct responses was submitted to a 2 × 3 repeated-measures ANOVA with factors Gender and Emotional expression of knocking
Summary
Body language reading is of immense importance for adaptive social behavior and non-verbal communication. This ability constitutes a central component of social competence. Healthy perceivers are able to infer emotions and dispositions of others represented by point-light body movements that minimize availability of other cues (Pollick et al, 2001; Atkinson et al, 2004; Heberlein et al, 2004; Clarke et al, 2005; Ikeda and Watanabe, 2009; Rose and Clarke, 2009). Perceivers can reliably judge emotional content of dance represented by a few moving dots placed on the dancer’s body (Dittrich et al, 1996). Observers can discriminate between deceptive and true intentions conveyed by body motion, and true information is precisely detected despite misleading endeavors (Runeson and Frykholm, 1983; Grèzes et al, 2004a,b)
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