Gender Differences in Emotional Recognition

Overview

Objectives/Goals The purpose of this project is to find out whether gender plays a role in an individual's ability to recognize and identify facial expressions. Participants of two genders, male and female, will be presented a total of 10 images on a computer screen. The images will consist of people with different facial expressions of distinct emotions. The participants will be asked to look at the image presented and then pick the correct emotion out of four possible emotions listed. The answer choices will be similar to each other: for example, if a confused face is shown, the answer choices might be angry, disgusted, impatient, and confused, rather than happy, sympathetic, sad, and confused. This format will require the participant to analyze the picture with greater care before he or she selects an answer. Methods/Materials Computer with excel software, Microsoft Powerpoint software with images and answer choices, lab notebook, pencil, group of 30 participants (15 male and 15 female). Recorded participants' gender, presented images on the computer screen, recorded participants' choices, calculated average accuracy for both males and females using Microsoft Office Excel calculation software. Results The data shows that the males were accurate 64.54 percent of the time while the females were accurate 65.71 percent of the time. There is not much of a difference between the accuracy of the males and females (only 1.17 percent). Conclusions/Discussion The hypothesis that women are better than men at recognizing and correctly identifying facial expressions proved right. There is no difference between the genders when it comes to recognizing and correctly identifying facial expressions, and the slight difference between the accuracy of the males and females may have also been caused by chance. It may have happened that the males and females in the selected sample of people were comparatively equal in terms of recognizing and identifying facial expressions. Additionally, the participants were between ages 13 and 15, and it might be possible that this certain age group is equally good at recognizing and correctly identifying facial expressions.

Competition history

• CSEF 2017 Behavioral & Social Sciences · Entry S0401

Resources

• CSEF project summary ↗

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