14 DAY TRIAL // In a new series of experiments, scientists asked a number of volunteers to look at photos of androgynous faces, and determine which was male and which was female. The participants were very likely to say that people with lower eyebrows and tight lips – signs of anger – were men, while the characters with higher eyebrows and smiles – which are considered signs of happiness and/or fear – were women. The study, which appears in the latest issue of the Journal of Vision, shows that perhaps our perception of the other gender is based more on facial recognition than we would like to accept.
In a second study, the participants were asked to look at photos of males and females having expressions ranging from happiness and anger to sadness and fear. Angry males were the easiest to identify, the team behind the investigation reveals, whereas telling angry women apart proved more difficult. “The present research shows that the association between anger and men and happiness and women is so strong that it can influence the decisions about the gender of another person when that person is viewed briefly,” University of Quebec in Montreal (UQ) Department of Psychology expert Ursula Hess, PhD, says.
“The face is a complex social signaling system in which signals for emotion, behavioral intentions and gender all overlap,” the authors write in the journal entry. Hess says that there are a number of things that people generally notice in a face. For example, a high forehead, a square jaw, and thicker eyebrows usually lead to a face being identified as belonging to a male. All these traits have also been linked to a perception of dominance, the group reveals. Conversely, rounded, baby faces with large eyes, which are characteristic of women, have all been proven to be tied to the perception of the individual being approachable and warm, the group says.
“This difference in how the emotions and social traits of the two sexes are perceived could have significant implications for social interactions in a number of settings. Our research demonstrates that equivalent levels of anger are perceived as more intense when shown by men rather than women, and happiness as more intense when shown by women rather than men. It also suggests that it is less likely for men to be perceived as warm and caring and for women to be perceived as dominant,” Hess concludes, quoted by ScienceDaily.