Facial Emotion Detection: Can Women Better Identify Facial Emotional Expressions than Men?

Abstract

This study investigated whether or not gender is a factor in the detection of facial emotional expressions. Specifically, we looked at the amount of accurate detections made by men and women of the emotional expressions of anger, sadness, happiness, disgust, surprise and fear that they were shown. Introductory psychology students (N=48) watched a PowerPoint displaying two pictures of each emotional expression. We found that women accurately predicted more of the facial expressions (p=0.001). The results suggest that women are more adept at identifying facial emotional expressions than men.

Keywords: emotion, detection, gender