Gender Diversity in Emotion Research
Abstract
Emotion perception, or how we view and understand the emotions of others, is a critically important part of everyday interactions. However, there is ample evidence that emotion perception ability differs across individuals and can be biased (Lindquist & Gendron, 2013). Gender, in particular, has been shown to significantly influence emotion perception (Thompson, 2013; Olderbak, 2017; Sullivan, 2017). Previous research suggests that there are gendered stereotypes about emotion, meaning people tend to believe men and women experience and express emotions differently. A series of studies showed that women were generally believed to experience and express most emotions more often than men, except for a few high-dominance emotions such as anger and pride (Plant, 2000).
These gendered expectations about emotion influence how a person’s emotion expressions are perceived by others. For example, people rate images of women as sadder and less angry than images of men (Plant, 2000). People also tend to pick up on sad emotion expressions in female faces faster than those of males and are generally quicker to identify angry expressions in young male faces than female faces (Parmley, 2014).
While this research has done a lot to help us understand how the emotions of men and women are perceived differently, there is a distinct lack of understanding concerning how transgender, nonbinary, and other gender-nonconforming people fit into the conversation. My research, which was funded by a Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) from the Hamel Center for Undergraduate Research, aimed to fill this gap. I have always been interested in how gender is perceived and expressed, and I was especially interested in pursuing this topic because it perfectly combines my two majors: psychology and women and gender studies. My interest in emotion research was also heavily influenced by my work with the Affect and Social Psychophysiology (ASP) Lab under my mentor, Dr. Jolie Wormwood.
In the field of psychology, a stimulus is anything that causes a reaction in an individual. Stimuli can be sounds, smells, social situations, or, in this case, pictures. A stimulus set is a group of stimuli used in psychological research to measure how people are affected by a certain category of stimuli. Emotion research often uses sets of facial images expressing different emotions. While considering research questions for my project, I realized that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to explore topics related to gender diversity using existing stimulus sets. Therefore my specific research objective was to build a gender-diverse stimulus set of human facial expressions of emotion and to collect preliminary normative ratings of the stimulus set. These ratings are meant to determine how each image tends to be interpreted by others.