Sex differences in emotion recognition: investigating the moderating effects of stimulus features

ABSTRACT

Emotion recognition – a prerequisite for social interactions – varies among individuals. Sex differences have been proposed as a central source of individual differences, although the existing evidence is rather heterogeneous. In the current study (N = 426), we investigated the potential moderating effects of stimulus features, including modality, emotion specificity, and the sex of the encoder (referring to the sex of the actor) on the magnitude of sex differences in emotion recognition. Our findings replicated women’s overall better emotion recognition, particularly evident for negative expressions (fear and anger) compared to men. This outperformance was observed across all modalities, with the largest differences for audiovisually expressed emotions, while the sex of the encoder had no impact. Given our findings, future studies should consider these and other potential moderator variables to better estimate sex differences.

KEYWORDS:

• Sex differences
• emotion recognition
• facial expression
• vocal expression
• audiovisual

Acknowledgements

We express our gratitude to the student assistants who assisted with data collection, Adi Lausen for supplying data from male subjects, Edmund Henniges for programming the experiment, Francesco Grassi for helping with data preprocessing, and Roger Mundry for his statistical support. We further would like to thank all participants who took part in the experiments.

Author contributions

The study was conceptualised and designed by Y.R. and A.S. The project was supervised by A.S. Y.R, analysed the data and drafted the manuscript. Both authors contributed by commenting and revising the final manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available on Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/u2khx/.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by funding from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft; Grant/Award Number: Project number 254142454/GRK 2070, and the Leibniz-Gemeinschaft through support for the Leibniz ScienceCampus Primate Cognition (W45/2019).