14 DAY TRIAL // According to the conclusions of a new scientific study, it would appear that people who see body language that can be characterized as angry are very likely to say that the body belongs to a man. Conversely, they identify a sad body language with a woman.
In a series of experiments, researchers at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) and the University of Glasgow used manipulated videos of pitching baseball players to tease out these differences.
They blurred the faces of the pitchers, and made their gender unrecognizable. Each pitch was carried out either aggressively or passively, which translates into angry or sad for the purpose of the study.
Participants were then asked to determine what emotions the pitchers experienced when throwing the ball, and also to identify their gender. Despite the lack of visual data, test subjects were still able to figure out when the person they were looking at was angry or sad.
“Even when observers received minimal information, they were able to discern the thrower’s emotion,” explains UCLA assistant professor of communication studies Dr. Kerri Johnson.
“The findings fit with a growing body of work that shows some ‘snap’ judgments are highly accurate,” adds the scientist, who was the lead author of the new investigation.
“But when it comes to deciding whether the actors were male or female, judgments tended to be less accurate, and that may be because perceptions are colored by longstanding stereotypes about masculine and feminine behavior,” says Johnson, quoted by PsychCentral.
The research group used actors to convey emotions in the ball pitch. Sensors were attached to their arms and legs, and so all participants in the survey could see was a series of white dots moving on a black background.
Still, they were able to tease out the emotions the actors were trying to convey with great ease, the investigators write in the latest issue of the esteemed scientific journal Cognition.
Anger was accurately identified in 70 percent of cases, whereas sadness in only 30 percent. The team says that they expected the percentage of those who guess the emotions by chance to be 25.
When it came to determining the gender of the pitcher, participants judged 70 percent of the aggressive throws as masculine, and 60 percent of the “sad” ones as feminine. This demonstrates the existence of a bias in this regard.
“It’s OK – even expected – for men to express anger. But when women have a negative emotion, they’re expected to express their displeasure with sadness,” Johnson proposes.
“Similarly, women are allowed to cry, whereas men face all kinds of stigma if they do so. Here, we found that these stereotypes impact very basic judgments of others as well, such as whether a person is a man or woman,” the expert concludes.