Surprising Smiles and Unanticipated Frowns: How Emotion and Status Influence Gender Categorization

Beliefs about who typically expresses which emotions are deeply ingrained and likely affect how people perceive and respond to emotional displays by others. We examined how emotional expressions and social status separately and in combination affect how quickly participants can categorize faces by their gender. The speed with which people categorize targets is informative about what combinations are expected or not. In Study 1, participants categorized the gender of targets displaying angry, happy, and neutral expressions. Response times were slower to incongruent gender-emotion pairs (angry female faces, happy male faces) relative to both neutral and congruent expressions. In Study 2, participants again categorized the gender of targets, this time presented as having high or low status. Target status affected response times to female targets only. Female targets were categorized more slowly when they both had high status and expressed anger (vs. happiness or no emotion). No differences by emotion were found for low-status female targets. In sum, anger was incongruent with women at an automatic level both when they had high status and when their status was unmarked, whereas explicit low-status information eliminated this incongruity. These data confirm the existence of deeply-ingrained associations linking status, gender, and emotion and underscore the importance of emotional expression and status in how women are perceived.