Abstract
Previous meta-analyses and reviews on gender differences in emotion recognition have shown a small to moderate female advantage. However, inconsistent evidence from recent studies has raised questions regarding the implications of different methodologies, stimuli, and samples. In the present research based on a community sample of more than 5000 participants, we tested the emotional sensitivity hypothesis, stating that women are more sensitive to perceive subtle, i.e. low intense or ambiguous, emotion cues. In addition, we included a self-report emotional intelligence test in order to examine any discrepancy between self-perceptions and actual performance for both men and women. We used a wide range of stimuli and models, displaying six different emotions at two different intensity levels. In order to better tap sensitivity for subtle emotion cues, we did not use a forced choice format, but rather intensity measures of different emotions. We found no support for the emotional sensitivity account, as both genders rated the target emotions as similarly intense at both levels of stimulus intensity. Men, however, more strongly perceived non-target emotions to be present than women. In addition, we also found that the lower scores of men in self-reported EI was not related to their actual perception of target emotions, but it was to the perception of non-target emotions.
Highlights
The extent to which people are able to correctly perceive emotions on others’ faces has been regarded as one important ingredient of emotional intelligence [1]
We first computed ‘target’ and ‘non-target’ emotion indices for each emotion
The target emotion rating is operationalized as the perceived intensity of the intended emotion display, and the non-target emotion rating is the average perceived intensity of the non-intended emotion displays
Summary
The extent to which people are able to correctly perceive emotions on others’ faces has been regarded as one important ingredient of emotional intelligence [1]. Several explanations have been advanced, such as the idea that women would be better in recognizing emotions from female faces, or that women would be better in recognizing only stereotypical female emotions [20, 21, 22]. One alternative explanation that has been advanced for the inconsistencies in previous studies is the nature of the stimuli: women would be better in recognizing subtle emotions, such as when the emotion is less intense or prototypical [21]. This implies that women would be more sensitive to subtle cues of emotional expressions. We argue that this sensitivity can be better tapped with an emotional intensity profile task rather than a categorization task
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