Sex differences in emotion recognition by observing body movements: A case of American students

Japanese Pvycholokneat Research 1987, Vol.29, No.2, 89-93 Short Report Sex differences in emotion recognition by observing body movements: A case of American students SHUNYA SOGON1 Human Emotion Laboratory, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Osaka Gakuin University, Suita, Osaka 564 CARROLL E. I ZARD Department of Psychology, University of Delaware, Newark, Delaware 19716 U.S.A. This study explores the differences in decoding abilities between American males and females, who judged emotion by observing the body movements of Japanese actors/actresses with back turned toward the viewer. The stimuli consisted of 8 mm motion pictures, divided into 6-s scenes which contained 114 scenes. On the film, each of the four actors/actresses posed body movements for the each of the seven fundamental emotion categories of joy, surprise, fear, sadness, disgust, anger and contempt, and the three affective-cognitive structures of affection, anticipation and acceptance. Both male and female subjects identified reliably the emotion of fear, sadness, anger and disgust. Moreover, females were better decoders than males regarding the body movement patterns of disgust, fear, and sadness. Compared to the body movements of the negative emotions, those of the positive emotion for joy and affectivecognitive categories of affection and acceptance were not so well identified. Key words: sex difference, emotion, body movement, cross cultural, identification. Many researchers have been reported on the question of sex differences in emotion expression and emotion recognition. Several studies with adults subjects have shown that females are better receivers than males (Gallagher & Shuntich, 1981; Rosenthal, Hall, DiMatteo, Rogers, & Archer, 1979). On the contrary, a few studies have found that there is no sex difference in emotion recognition (Feldman & Thayer, 1980). After reviewing the literature, Hall (1978) concluded that most data indicate that females are more accurate in emotion recognition (receiving) than males. However, the results with child subjects were divided regarding sex difference. Several investigators found no difference between females' and males' recognition ability (Ekman & Friesen, 1971; Gitter, Mostofsky, & Quincy, 1971). Others obtained data supporting the female advantage (Rosenthal et al., 1979; Requests for reprints should be sent to the original author. Sogon & Izard, 1985). Many studies have addressed the issue of relationships between sending and receiving abilities (Zuckerman, Lipets, Koivumaki, & Rosenthal, 1975; Buck, Miller, & Caul, 1974). The results showed that the relationship between sending and receiving ability is not the same for all emotions. In addition, Feldman, White, and Labato (1980) reported that girls, with increasing age, became better at deceptive display of facial expression than boys. Sending and receiving processes are probably influenced by both biological and socio-cultural factors. For example, newborn girls tend to cry more than boys when another infant's cry is heard (Sagi & Hoffman, 1976). This tendency may be facilitated by the social relationships between infants and caregivers. For example, Buck et al. (1974) maintained that in the U.S. culture, male children are generally discouraged more than female children from overtly expressing most emotions. Sogon and Izard (1985) suggested

90 S. Sogon and C. E. Izard that in,japanese culture such a socio-cultural influence also applies. In another cross-sectional study (Blanck, Ito,,enthal, Snodgrass, Del'aulo, & Zuckermain, 1981), female students were more sensitive than male students to overt cues of expression. This disparity was found to increase with age. Further, Buck (1977) found a negative correlation in preschool boys, between increasing age and communicative accuracy. Such a tendency was not found for preschool girls. These facts suggest that females may become accurate receivers with increasing age. The results of Feldman et al. (1980) might support the ideas that females try to identify correct information from others as they are better at deceptive display than males. An explanation for these sex differences in abilities of emotion expression and recognition have been offered by Buck (1977), who suggested that children of an "externalizer" character may have an advantage in these abilities in both genders. Zuckerman, DeFrank, Spiegel, and Larrance (1982) suggested that femininity, when characterized by expressivity, supportiveness, and interpersonal sensitivity affords an advantage in sending ability. Hall and Halberstadt (1981) suggested that "masculine" types people, who are interpersonally effective, may perform the ability to judge other's feelings and moods. All of these researches employed the same culture stimuli and subjects for judging and expressing. The purpose of the present study was to examine sex differences in recognition of emotion from body movements. As argued by Ekman (1972) and Ekman and Friesen (1971), and Izard (1971), certain facial expressions must be considered as universal phenomena. With this in mind, this experiment was designed to preclude facial information; the stimuli consists only of body movements portrayed by Japanese with their backs turned toward the viewer. Method Subjects Subjects were students in introductory psychology classes at the University of Delaware. Participation was an option among their course requirements. Fortyseven females and 47 males completed the judgment task. Materials The stimuli consisted of 8 mm motion pictures divided into six-second scenes. The film contained 114 scenes, and in each scene, one of four actors/actresses ( Japanese amateurs), posed emotional expression by means of body movement. The actor/actress's back was turned toward the viewer during the scenes. During first two seconds of each scene, the actor/actress maintained a neutral posture (standing upright, hands at sides), after which body movements were displayed for four seconds. All scenes were posed by two females, aged 21 and 54, and by two males, aged 21 and 51. On the reel, each of the four actors/actresses posed body movements for each of the seven fundamental emotion categories of joy, surprise, fear, sadness, disgust, anger, contempt and the three affective-cognitive concepts of affection, anticipation and acceptance. On the reel, the actors/actresses appeared in the following order : 21 year old female, 21 year old male, 54 year old female, 51 year old male. While the actors/actresses were instructed in the designed content of each scene within each emotion category, not every actor/actress posed for each such instructional condition. Some of the movements in instructional conditions were inappropriate and/or difficult for one of the genders or ages to display. Therefore, this film contained 28 scenes of 21 year old actress' movements, 31 scenes of 21 year old actor's movements, 26 scenes of 54 year old actress' movements, and 29 scenes of 51 year old actor's movements.

Sex differences in emotion recognition from body movement 91 Procedure Subjects were told that they were participating in a study of emotions and body movement. They were told that they would be shown some scenes of Japanese people "moving in different ways" and would be asked to evaluate them. Subjects were asked to choose one emotion, from a list of ten, which they felt was "best expressed" by a given scene. Each scene lasted six seconds and subjects were given 24 seconds in which to record their response. The experimental session lasted approximately 60 minutes. by both sexes. Further, females showed good identification for disgust, fear, and sadness categories. Analysis of varience was performed on the data to investigate the decoding abilities. In decoding the movements in disgust expression, there was a significant sex effect and females were better decoders than males (F(1/92)=6.48, p<.01). Also, in decoding the fear expression, there was a significant sex effect, and females were better than males (F(1/92)=4.65, p<.03). For sadness, sex effect approached significance (F(1/92)=3.47, p<.07). Results Figure 1 shows the mean percentage of correct identification for seven fundamental and three affective-cognitive emotion categories, by male and female U.S. subjects. The emotion categories correctly identified by females were (in descending order) fear, sadness, anger, disgust, joy, surprise, acceptance, affection, anticipation and contempt. Generally, male subjects showed same ranking, differentiating the top three and bottom four emotion categories. As indicated in Fig. 1, in spite of back expression by Japanese, some expressions were judged fairly accurate. For instance, fear, sadness, and anger expressions were better identified than the other categories Surprise Sadness Anger Affection Acceptance Categories of Emotion Fig. 1. Percentage of identification across ten categories emotion. Discussion The present study focussed on sex differences in decoding ability in nonverbal communication using cross-cultural stimuli. Even though some facial expression of emotions are universal phenomena (Ekman, 1972; Izard, 1971), these still remain socialization effects as discussed by Hochschild (1979) and Lewis and Michalson (1983), which merit investigation. Further, Birdwhistell (1970) hypothesized that all movements are affected by culture and familial socialization. Although we precluded facial information, U.S. subjects showed a fairly good identification in decoding body movement for several emotions. This was especially so for fear, anger, and sadness. In these identification, females showed better decoding abilities than males. The results of Fujita, Harper, and Wiens (1980) showed that females were significantly better than males in an enacting display, although no significant difference was shown for spontaneous display. Despite great cultural differences between Western and Far Eastern societies, females in both cultures are permitted free expression of emotion. Moreover, these displays are regarded as appropriately feminine. While, questions still remain regarding the relative encoding and decoding abilities of males and females, these social factors may

92 S. Sogon and C. E. Izard reinforce the development of emotional communication ability in females. For instance, as Buck (1977) suggested, females' overt expressiveness are related to being less physiologically responsive. And these facts sugested that decreasing internal reactivity may be a product of the increased overt expressiveness of emotion. There is another possibility regarding the ability of females in decoding body movements. Males in both Far Eastern and Western cultures may arguably be at a social advantage over females. Argyle, Salter, Nicholson, Williams, and Burgess (1970) found nonverbal signals to he more effective than verbal signals in communicating interpersonal attitude regarding status. Females' weaker position in social life seem to be acquire greater caution and sensitivity in such a society. On other words, females are more sociable than males, and this sex differences started in early childhood as discussed by Smith and Connolly (1972). As discussed by Izard (1971), it is very difficult to determine which emotion is positive and which is negative, because these classifications are dependent upon theoretical points of view. For instance, in biological and evolutional theories, anger is a positive emotion as it pertains to survival, However, in our experience, anger is considered to be a negative emotion, because this emotion disturbs our human relationships. Therefore, some cultures suppress the expression of anger, if it is possible. The same relationships could be hypothesized between fear, sadness, and disgust. As discussed earlier, there are two phases in emotion; one has a more direct affect on momentary situation, while the other is more indirect, but important role in the evolutional processes of humans and animals. However, we mainly consider human relationships in their social context, and these emotions should be regarded as negative. Contempt was usually considered a negative emotion. Nevertheless, in our results, contempt was identified least correctly among these seven fundamental emotion categories. Hence, we may hypothesize that contempt includes more cultural components than other negative emotions like anger, sadness, and disgust. Therefore, U.S. subjects could not identify this emotion as correctly as they did for the other four negative emotions. As surprise, U.S. subjects could not identify this emotion, although Japanese data showed fairly good identification (Sogon, 1983). Surprise movements represented as moving backward and these movements were misjudged for fear. As for positive emotions, identification was not as correctly as in the case of emotions. As discussed by Zaidel and Mehrabian (1969), the negative emotions are easier to identify than positive ones. In our results, we have obtained the facts to support this tendency. Positive emotions such as affection, acceptance are difficult to identify, partly because these expressions have many cultural components. For instance, an affection scene which displayed the typical pose of a Japanese holding a baby on one's back was mistaken for the expression of anticipation by U.S. subjects. On the other hand, typical display of Japanese praying for the God's protection was mistaken for acceptance expression. These emblematic features suggest that the affective-cognitive structures of emotion contains many acquired features and are understood correctly only by people of the same culture. Although joy is a fundamental emotion, it was mistaken for various other kinds of emotional expression. Emotion of joy may be expression of individual experiences, which may be affected by personal differences of receiving ability rather than cultural differences. In summary, cultural, personal, and socio-economical differences as reported by Argyle (1975), influence the sending and receiving abilities of emotion, and these factors also affect sex differences of emo-

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