Abstract
There is evidence that women are better in recognizing their own and others' emotions. The female advantage in emotion recognition becomes even more apparent under conditions of rapid stimulus presentation. Affective priming paradigms have been developed to examine empirically whether facial emotion stimuli presented outside of conscious awareness color our impressions. It was observed that masked emotional facial expression has an affect congruent influence on subsequent judgments of neutral stimuli. The aim of the present study was to examine the effect of gender on affective priming based on negative and positive facial expression. In our priming experiment sad, happy, neutral, or no facial expression was briefly presented (for 33 ms) and masked by neutral faces which had to be evaluated. 81 young healthy volunteers (53 women) participated in the study. Subjects had no subjective awareness of emotional primes. Women did not differ from men with regard to age, education, intelligence, trait anxiety, or depressivity. In the whole sample, happy but not sad facial expression elicited valence congruent affective priming. Between-group analyses revealed that women manifested greater affective priming due to happy faces than men. Women seem to have a greater ability to perceive and respond to positive facial emotion at an automatic processing level compared to men. High perceptual sensitivity to minimal social-affective signals may contribute to women's advantage in understanding other persons' emotional states.
Highlights
According to commonly held beliefs, women are more emotional, experiencing and expressing emotions in general more intensely than do men
In the present investigation affective priming based on facial expressions of emotions was examined for the first time as a function of gender
In our priming experiment we investigated the evaluative shifts elicited by negative and positive facial expression shown below the threshold of subjective conscious perception
Summary
According to commonly held beliefs, women are more emotional, experiencing and expressing emotions in general more intensely than do men. They are thought to have superiority in emotional competence such as understanding others’ emotions [1,2]. An important aspect of emotional competence is the ability to recognize emotions from facial expressions. Results from meta analyses show that there is a female advantage in recognizing facially expressed emotions even though the mean effect size seems to be rather small [7,8]. Women appear to recognize facial emotions better than men in particular under conditions of minimal stimulus information, i.e. when facial expression is shown for less than a second
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