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Original Articles

Gender differences in emotion recognition: Impact of sensory modality and emotional category

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Pages 452-469 | Received 26 Feb 2012, Accepted 19 Aug 2013, Published online: 24 Oct 2013
 

Abstract

Results from studies on gender differences in emotion recognition vary, depending on the types of emotion and the sensory modalities used for stimulus presentation. This makes comparability between different studies problematic. This study investigated emotion recognition of healthy participants (N = 84; 40 males; ages 20 to 70 years), using dynamic stimuli, displayed by two genders in three different sensory modalities (auditory, visual, audio-visual) and five emotional categories. The participants were asked to categorise the stimuli on the basis of their nonverbal emotional content (happy, alluring, neutral, angry, and disgusted). Hit rates and category selection biases were analysed. Women were found to be more accurate in recognition of emotional prosody. This effect was partially mediated by hearing loss for the frequency of 8,000 Hz. Moreover, there was a gender-specific selection bias for alluring stimuli: Men, as compared to women, chose “alluring” more often when a stimulus was presented by a woman as compared to a man.

This work was supported by a grants of the Fortüne-Program of the University of Tübingen (fortüne 1997-0-0).

This work was supported by a grants of the Fortüne-Program of the University of Tübingen (fortüne 1997-0-0).

Supplementary material

Supplementary material (Tables 6–8) is available via the ‘Supplementary’ tab on the article's online page (http://dx.doi.org.10.1080/02699931.2013.837378).

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