The Role of Gender in Interpreting Subtleties of Facial Expressions

Abstract

Recent research on Facial Expressions (by Matsumoto, Wallbott and Scherer in 1989) has revealed that facial expressions are both culture specific and universal. However, this paper aims at explaining the difference in how men and women interpret and relate to the seven universal facial expressions of anger, sadness, happiness, fear, disgust, contempt and surprise. To understand whether both the sexes read emotions the same way, a survey was conducted amongst 200 boys and 200 girls (in the age group of 18-21) at the Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS), Pilani in India. The respondents were asked to write down an emotion (from a list of emotions) that they thought corresponded most to the facial expression that was shown. The analysis performed on the data obtained and the results arrived at in this paper provide evidence in support of the hypothesis that there is a correlation between particular facial muscular patterns and the way these are interpreted by both the sexes