Sex differences in emotion recognition by observing body movements

Abstract

This study explores the differences in decoding abilities between American males and females, who judged emotion by observing the body movements of Japanese actors/actresses with back turned toward the viewer. The stimuli consisted of 8 mm motion pictures, divided into 6-s scenes which contained 114 scenes. On the film, each of the four actors/actresses posed body movements for the each of the seven fundamental emotion categories of joy, surprise, fear, sadness, disgust, anger and contempt, and the three affective-cognitive structures of affection, anticipation and acceptance. Both male and female subjects identified reliably the emotion of fear, sadness, anger and disgust. Moreover, females were better decoders than males regarding the body movement patterns of disgust, fear, and sadness. Compared to the body movements of the negative emotions, those of the positive emotion for joy and affective-cognitive categories of affection and acceptance were not so well identified.