Getting to the bottom of emotion stereotypes

CHARLESTOWN, Mass., September 28, 2009 -- People often believe that women are more emotional than men. This has always been the case, and indeed may help to explain why women are underrepresented in positions of economic and political power that demand a level head and steady hand. Objective measures of facial expression and cardiovascular and neural response have not borne it out, however.

In a paper soon to be published in the journal Emotion -- “She’s Emotional. He’s Having a Bad Day: Attributional Explanations for Emotion Stereotypes” -- Martinos Center researcher Lisa Feldman Barrett and Eliza Bliss-Moreau of the University of California, Davis probed the source of these beliefs. “We wanted to know whether this stereotype about the difference in men’s and women’s emotionality is rooted in how people explain emotional behaviors, not in the behaviors themselves,” Barrett said.

Key to the study was the distinction between “dispositional attribution” -- the belief that another person’s behavior is determined by his or her personality -- and “situational attribution” -- the belief that his or her behavior is caused by immediate context. The literature offers a wealth of evidence that people tend to ascribe the former to women and the latter to men. Barrett and Bliss-Moreau hypothesized that this would hold true even when situational information was provided for the behaviors.

In two sets of experiments, participants were shown pictures of male and female faces expressing anger, sadness, fear or disgust. In every case, the picture was paired with a sentence offering a possible explanation for the emotion depicted. For example, a picture showing an angry face might have been paired with the sentence, “was yelled at by boss.” Thus participants had the information needed to make situational attributions.

Even with this information, Barrett said, they were more likely to make dispositional attributions for females’ emotional expressions (“she is an emotional person”). Conversely, they were more apt to make situational attributions for males’ emotional behaviors (“something must have happened to him”).

These findings help to explain the persistent beliefs about the emotionality of women. Still missing, however, is a full understanding of what underlies these beliefs, of where they come from. Barrett and Bliss-Moreau are currently exploring two possible explanations for this bias: one involving the ways the brain predicts the meaning of incoming sensory input; the other, the possibility that people approach male and female targets with different cognitive goals.

Contact: Lisa Feldman Barrett