People are quicker tosee anger on men's faces and happiness on women's. Is this researchfinding a simple case of genderstereotyping, or something more deeply rooted? When I was conducting researchon smiling my clients assumed that women always smiled more than men.Women do smile more than men, when they are in public. We like our women tosmile that makes all of us men and women feel safe. There are more interestinginsights in the following article by Beth Azar.
By Beth Azar
Print version: page 18
Our brains automatically link angerto men and happiness to women, even without the influence of genderstereotypes, indicate the findings of a series of experiments conducted bycognitive psychologist D. Vaughn Becker, PhD, of Arizona State University atthe Polytechnic Campus, with colleagues Douglas T. Kenrick, PhD, Steven L.Neuberg, PhD, K.C. Blackwell and Dylan Smith, PhD. They even turned it aroundto show that people are more likely to think a face is masculine if it's makingan angry expression and feminine if its expression is happy. In fact, theirresearch, published in February's Journal of Personality and SocialPsychology (Vol. 92, No. 2, pages 179-190), suggests that the cognitiveprocesses that distinguish male and female may be co-mingled with those thatdistinguish anger from happiness, thereby leading to this perceptual bias.
Becker proposes that this bias maystem from our evolutionary past, when an angry man would have been one of themost dangerous characters around, and a nurturing, happy female might have beenjust the person to protect you from harm. Evolutionary psychologist LedaCosmides, PhD, agrees.
"If it's more costly to make amistake of not recognizing an angry man, you would expect the [perceptual]threshold to be set lower than for recognizing an angry female," saysCosmides, of the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB).
More than a stereotype
Becker first noticed that peoplefind it easier to detect anger on men and happiness on women a couple years agowhile working on his dissertation at Arizona State. He was testing whetherviewing an angry or happy expression "primes" people to more quicklyidentify a subsequent angry or happy expression. Becker confirmed his initialhypothesis, but when he ran an additional analysis to test whether the genderof the person making the facial expression affected his results, he found thatgender was, by far, the biggest predictor of how quickly and accurately peopleidentified facial expressions.
Becker couldn't find any mention ofthis gender effect in the literature. So he set out to confirm that people morequickly link men to anger and women to happiness and figure out why that mightbe.
In the first of a series of studies,38 undergraduate participants viewed pictures of faces displaying prototypicalangry and happy expressions. They pressed "A" or "H" on acomputer keyboard to indicate whether the expression was angry or happy, andthe researchers recorded their reaction times. As expected, participants werequicker to label male faces "angry" and female faces"happy."
The researchers then used a versionof the "Implicit Association Test" to uncover unconscious biases thatstudy participants may have linking men to anger and women to happiness. Thewell-documented test allows researchers to examine the strength of connectionsbetween categories, which lead to unconscious stereotypes. Becker testedwhether study participants unconsciously linked male names with angry words andfemale names with happy words. Most did.
However, 13 students showed theopposite association (male-happy, female-angry), implying that theirunconscious gender stereotypes run counter to those of the general public. Itwas an ideal opportunity to determine whether gender stereotypes are at the heartof the emotion/gender bias. They weren't: Just like the main group ofparticipants, this subgroup more quickly and accurately categorized male facesas angry and female faces as happy.
"While gender stereotypesclearly influence perception, the implicit association test results made usthink the effect is not solely a function of stereotypes," says Becker.
Overlapping signals
Since gender stereotypes don't seemto be the culprit, Becker looked toward more deeply rooted causes.
For example, perhaps we see more menwith angry faces--on television, in movies--than we see women with angry faces,so our brains are well practiced at recognizing an angry expression on a man.To investigate this possibility, one of the co-authors, Arizona StateUniversity graduate student K.C. Blackwell, suggested they flip the experimentaround. Instead of asking people to identify facial expressions while theexperimenters manipulated gender, they asked them to identify whether a facewas male or female while manipulating facial expressions.
"While you can argue that themajority of angry faces we see are male, it's tough to argue that the majorityof male faces we see are angry," says Becker. So, if the relationshipbetween emotional expression and gender is simply a matter of how frequently wesee anger on men and happiness on women, the effect should disappear whenresearchers flip around the question. What they found, on the contrary, wasthat people were faster to identify angry faces as male and happy faces asfemale.
To follow-up on this finding, theyconducted another study in which they used computer graphics software tocontrol not only the intensity of facial expressions, but also the masculinityand femininity of the facial features, creating faces that were just slightlymasculine or feminine. As predicted, people were more likely to see the moremasculine faces as angrier, even when they had slightly happier expressionsthan the more feminine faces.
These findings suggest that thebrain begins to associate emotions and gender very early in the cognitiveprocess, says Becker. One possible explanation is that the brain has an"angry male detection module" enabling fast and accurate detection ofwhat would have been one of the most dangerous entities in our evolutionary past.But Becker thinks there's a more parsimonious explanation.
"I'm more inclined to thinkthat we've got a situation where the signals for facial expressions and thosefor masculinity and femininity have merged over time," he says.
In particular, features ofmasculinity --such as a heavy brow and angular face--somewhat overlap with theanger expression, and those of femininity--roundness and soft features--overlapwith the happiness expression.
To test this hypothesis, Becker andhis colleagues used computer animation software to individually manipulatemasculine and feminine facial features of expressively neutral faces. Aspredicted, a heavier brow caused participants to see faces as both moremasculine and more angry, implying that the mental processes for determiningmasculinity and anger may be intertwined.
"These results make a lot ofsense," says University of Pittsburgh behavioral anthropologist and facialexpression researcher Karen Schmidt, PhD. "Faces have always had gender,so if we're always activating gender and affect at the same time then theprocessing is likely highly coordinated."
The paper raises new and interestingquestions about gender, says UCSB postdoctoral student Aaron Sell, PhD, whostudies the evolution of gender. "Specifically," he says, "whydo male and female faces differ, and what is the nature of emotiondetection?"
The data appear to suggest that theanger expression has evolved to make a face seem more masculine, says Sell.Even female faces may communicate anger more effectively the more masculinethey appear, says Becker. Future studies will have to tackle questions aboutthe intentions expressed by the angry face and why looking more male would bean evolutionary advantage in communicating these intentions.
"I see this article as openingthe book on a new research topic more than having the final say on theissue," says Sell.
Patti Wood, MA, Certified Speaking Professional - The Body Language Expert. For more body language insights go to her website at http://PattiWood.net. Also check out the body language quiz on her YouTube Channel at http://youtube.com/user/bodylanguageexpert.
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