Emotional women? Testing gender effects on emotion expression and recognition with genuine and dynamic emotion expressions

Past research has suggested women are more emotionally expressive and perceptive, and this is typically endorsed as a belief shared by the public (Briton & Hall, 1995; Plant et al., 2000; Timmers et al., 2003). However, there is a growing literature of mixed results finding generally small effects of gender on expression and perception. Little research has used genuine expressions and perceptions to assess whether expression or perception of emotion in daily life differs by gender. In this study, we collected multiple emotional expressions and the corresponding self-reports of emotion experience. Expressions were collected from 128 participants (94 female; 34 male). Another 824 participants (494 female, 313 male, 17 other) reported what emotion they perceived in those expressions. This resulted in 3775 emotion perceptions from 772 expressions. No difference across genders was found for either emotion expression or emotion perception. This research aligns with broader research identifying that the effect of gender on emotion expression and perception is dependent on context and social expectations, and typically small when identified. With extended naturalistic expressions, any possible gender differences could not be detected.