Honors Theses and Capstones

Date of Award

Spring 2024

Project Type

Senior Honors Thesis

College or School

COLA

Department

Psychology

Program or Major

Psychology

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

First Advisor

Jolie Wormwood

Second Advisor

April Bailey

Abstract

Much past research has demonstrated that gender plays an important role in emotion perception, such that gendered stereotypes about emotion seem to shape how we perceive and interpret the emotion expressions of men and women. However, the stimulus sets that are typically used in the vast majority of this research have been based on binary ideas of gender, and purposefully limit common elements of gender presentation, with models posing with limited accessories or personal aesthetic choices. In everyday life, however, individuals’ gender and gender presentation are not limited in these ways and likely contribute in important ways to how we perceive others and their emotions. The objective of this project is to build a gender diverse stimulus set of human facial expressions of emotion, and to collect preliminary normative ratings of the stimulus set. By creating a stimulus set that better reflects the kinds of gender diversity we encounter throughout daily life, I hope to shed more light on the ways gender and gender presentation affect emotion perception and to broaden the horizons of the field by allowing an underrepresented population to be studied.

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