Abstract
The present study aimed to investigate gender differences in the emotional evaluation of 18 film clips divided into six categories: Erotic, Scenery, Neutral, Sadness, Compassion, and Fear. 41 female and 40 male students rated all clips for valence-pleasantness, arousal, level of elicited distress, anxiety, jittery feelings, excitation, and embarrassment. Analysis of positive films revealed higher levels of arousal, pleasantness, and excitation to the Scenery clips in both genders, but lower pleasantness and greater embarrassment in women compared to men to Erotic clips. Concerning unpleasant stimuli, unlike men, women reported more unpleasantness to the Compassion, Sadness, and Fear compared to the Neutral clips and rated them also as more arousing than did men. They further differentiated the films by perceiving greater arousal to Fear than to Compassion clips. Women rated the Sadness and Fear clips with greater Distress and Jittery feelings than men did. Correlation analysis between arousal and the other emotional scales revealed that, although men looked less aroused than women to all unpleasant clips, they also showed a larger variance in their emotional responses as indicated by the high number of correlations and their relatively greater extent, an outcome pointing to a masked larger sensitivity of part of male sample to emotional clips. We propose a new perspective in which gender difference in emotional responses can be better evidenced by means of film clips selected and clustered in more homogeneous categories, controlled for arousal levels, as well as evaluated through a number of emotion focused adjectives.
Highlights
Sexual dimorphism and gender behavioral differences are widespread in nature [1]: an evolutionistic analysis may explain sexual differences as due to inherited traits linked to social-adaptive roles [2]
The ANOVA of emotional valence self-evaluation showed no effect of the Gender factor (F1,79 = 1.28, ns) and a main effect of Emotional Category (F5,395 = 72.01, p< 0.01). This indicated, in the post-hoc analysis, greater ratings for Erotic and Scenery compared to Neutral film clips, and significantly lower valence ratings for Compassion and Sadness film clips compared to Neutral and Fear with respect to the other two unpleasant conditions
Many gender studies have investigated the same categories, research has been fragmented by the lack of a control/measure of arousal level, the use of different means, the comparison of only 2–3 of these stimuli within one study, and by the use of Pleasant, Neutral, and Unpleasant macro-categories, in which emotional contents had a large heterogeneity across studies
Summary
Sexual dimorphism and gender behavioral differences are widespread in nature [1]: an evolutionistic analysis may explain sexual differences as due to inherited traits linked to social-adaptive roles [2]. Sex Differences in Film Emotional Evaluation limbic and paralimbic brain structures of women’s brains may help to explain their greater vulnerability to emotional stress and higher risk of developing a mood disorder [4,5]. In line with this clinical risk, in past literature, a first hypothesis on gender emotional difference tried to demonstrate that women report emotional experiences with greater intensity than men [6,7]. Film clip presentation has been proved to elicit a stronger affective state in the viewer and, at the same time, to be one of the most ecological tools available for the manipulation of emotions in the experimental setting, as it resembles real-world emotional exposure [17,18]
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