The effect of gender and age differences on the recognition of emotions from facial expressions

Abstract

Recent studies have demonstrated gender and cultural differences in the recognition of emotions in facial expressions. However, most studies were conducted on American subjects. In this paper, we explore the generalizability of several findings to a non-American culture in the form of Danish subjects. We conduct an emotion recognition task followed by two stereotype questionnaires with different genders and age groups. While recent findings (Krems et al., 2015) suggest that women are biased to see anger in neutral facial expressions posed by females, in our sample both genders assign higher ratings of anger to all emotions expressed by females. Furthermore, we demonstrate an effect of gender on the fear-surprise-confusion observed by Tomkins and McCarter (1964); females overpredict fear, while males overpredict surprise.