Facial expressions can inhibit the activation of gender stereotypes

ABSTRACT

Using faces as the priming stimuli, the present study explored the influence of facial expressions on the activation of gender stereotypes using a lexical decision paradigm. Experiment 1 explored the activation of gender stereotypes when the facial primes contained only gender information. The results showed that gender stereotypes were activated. In Experiment 2, the facial primes contained both gender category and expression information. The results indicated that gender stereotypes were not activated. Experiment 3 required the participants to make emotion, gender, or impression decisions concerning the facial primes before the lexical decision task. The results showed that gender stereotypes were not activated in emotion and impression decisions conditions, whereas stereotypes were activated in gender decisions condition. These finding suggest that facial expressions can inhibit automatic activation of gender stereotypes, unless the perceivers perform gender categorization processing to prime faces intentionally.

KEYWORDS:

• Facial expressions
• gender categorization
• gender stereotype activation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Shan Sun http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6025-5860

Notes

1 A 3 (facial prime expression type: angry, happy, neutral) × 2 (stereotype matching: matched, unmatched) × 3 (task: gender decision, emotion decision, impression decision) repeated measures ANOVA was also performed to examine the participants’ error rates. The results showed that no main effect or interaction effect was significant (ps > 0.1).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Youth Project of Humanities and Social Sciences of Ministry of Education of China: [grant number 14YJC190025, 18YJC190021]; National Natural Science Foundation of China: [grant number 31400902,31571147,31760287].