Aggregating emotional sequences amplifies the perception of women as more emotional than men.
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: The stereotype that women are more emotional than men is pervasive in Western culture. Yet little research has directly examined how this stereotype translates into the act of judging women as more emotional. We propose that one way gender stereotypes shape judgments of emotionality is through the aggregation of emotional expressions, in which perceivers preferentially remember stereotype-congruent emotional stimuli and consequently overweight these stimuli when forming judgments. To test this, we conducted 4 studies (N = 565). In Study 1, we validated the persistence of gender-emotion stereotypes. For Studies 2-4, we selected emotional expression stimuli that elicited no gender difference in ratings of emotionality at the single face level. Male participants saw sequences of male and female faces displaying emotional expressions ranging from neutral to angry (Study 2) or neutral to happy (Study 3) and were asked to indicate whether they considered the person in the sequence to be emotional or not. We found that when these stimuli, for which no gender difference was found at the single face level, were aggregated by male perceivers, they were more likely to rate sequences of female faces as emotional. Furthermore, using a memory test we show that participants better remembered angry female faces within a sequence compared to angry male faces (Study 4), supporting the idea that aggregation of emotional information enables stereotypes to influence judgments via memory. This study reveals an important mechanism by which stereotypes are translated into emotionality judgments.
Source: Emotion
DOI: 10.1037/emo0001622
Language: English
Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
SDG: Gender equality
Open Access status: gold
OpenAlex ID: W4416173394