Emotion perception: the influences of target gender appearance, gender identity, and race
Date
2024
Authors
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
The boundaries set by the gender binary remain influential in society, and the consequences of the pressure to conform are observable both through explicit (e.g., discriminatory interpersonal interactions) and implicit phenomena (e.g., unconscious thought processes influenced by the recognition of another’s identities). While emotion perception research has focused on the effects of target gender within the typical gender binary, the existing body of literature is largely limited to these identities. The present work seeks to extend our understanding of gender-based influences on emotion perception beyond the gender binary by investigating the interactive influences of gender appearance, gender identity, and race on the perception of sadness and pain. Digitally-rendered facial stimuli were used to assess participants’ perceptual thresholds for detecting emotional displays on faces varying along these dimensions. While these stimuli contain bottom-up cues to gender (whose influence we examine in Experiments 1-2), top-down cues were presented via the inclusion of explicitly-stated gender identity information in Experiments 3-6. Across six experiments, participants perceived both sadness and pain more readily on faces that appeared and/or identified as male than those that appeared and/or identified as female. Additionally, faces that appeared gender-ambiguous and/or identified as non-binary were typically perceived similarly to female-appearing/identified faces. Moreover, the results replicate prior work demonstrating the influence of race on emotion perception: participants tended to perceive sadness and pain more readily on Asian faces than Black faces, while thresholds for emotion perception on White faces were more similar to those for Asian faces than for Black faces. Treatment recommendations for both sadness and pain were generally consistent with the perceptual results with regard to the effects of target gender appearance and race. Notably, target gender identity, when manipulated independently from target gender appearance, did not predict thresholds for sadness or pain perception, nor did it predict treatment recommendations for either emotion. Taken together, we observe strong evidence for the impact of both target gender appearance and race on emotion perception, with tangible consequences for behavior. Specifically, the emotion displays of male-appearing/identifying and Black targets were most and readily perceived across this work, and these divergent perceptions guided participants’ treatment recommendations as a result.
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Keywords
Bias, Gender binary, Emotion perception, Race, Black faces