Male or Female? - Influence of Gender Role and Sexual Attraction on Sex Categorization of Faces.

Teresa Luther,Carolin A Lewis,Isabelle Bülthoff,Ute Habel,Birgit Derntl,Melina Grahlow,Philippa Hüpen,Celia Foster

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.718004

Abstract

The categorization of dominant facial features, such as sex, is a highly relevant function for social interaction. It has been found that attributes of the perceiver, such as their biological sex, influence the perception of sexually dimorphic facial features with women showing higher recognition performance for female faces than men. However, evidence on how aspects closely related to biological sex influence face sex categorization are scarce. Using a previously validated set of sex-morphed facial images (morphed from male to female and vice versa), we aimed to investigate the influence of the participant’s gender role identification and sexual orientation on face sex categorization, besides their biological sex. Image ratings, questionnaire data on gender role identification and sexual orientation were collected from 67 adults (34 females). Contrary to previous literature, biological sex per se was not significantly associated with image ratings. However, an influence of participant sexual attraction and gender role identity became apparent: participants identifying with male gender attributes and showing attraction toward females perceived masculinized female faces as more male and femininized male faces as more female when compared to participants identifying with female gender attributes and attraction toward males. Considering that we found these effects in a predominantly cisgender and heterosexual sample, investigation of face sex perception in individuals identifying with a gender different from their assigned sex (i.e., transgender people) might provide further insights into how assigned sex and gender identity are related.

Highlights

Given the paucity of studies on the relationship of face sex categorization and perceiver attributes closely related to their biological sex, the aim of the present study was to investigate how biological sex, gender, sexual orientation, and gender role influence face sex categorization performed on sexambiguous face stimuli
We found significant differences between male and female participants with regard to gender role identity
Besides the exploratory investigation of the effects of gender roles and sexual orientation, we hypothesized a sex effect, with females outperforming males for female faces as well as a male bias, which has been described in numerous previous studies within the face perception literature as the tendency to misclassify female faces as male faces in sex categorization tasks

Summary

Introduction

Humans communicate with each other on an almost daily basis and research has found that even before communication is initiated, we are able to derive crucial information about our fellow human beings solely based on their faces – regarding characteristics such as age (Bruce and Young, 1986; Wiese et al, 2008; Rhodes, 2009; Carbon et al, 2013), identity (Haxby et al, 2000; Schyns et al, 2002; Calder and Young, 2005), sexual orientation (Rule et al, 2008, 2009; Tskhay et al, 2013) and biological sex (Bruce et al, 1993), and regarding emotions (Ekman et al, 1987; Prkachin, 2003; Bombari et al, 2013), personality traits (Winston et al, 2002; Willis and Todorov, 2006) and attractiveness (Perrett et al, 1998; Little et al, 2011). The encoding process, and accuracy in performing the task, seems to be strongly influenced by featural cues of the face itself, but is influenced by several attributes related to the individual perceiving the face (Smith et al, 2007; Hillairet de Boisferon et al, 2019)

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Conclusion