The Psychology of Gender 4th Edition

Communication 247

masculine, displays of agency in lesbian lead-

ers may imply a lack of communal character-

istics—even more so than among heterosexual

women. It is not clear if this lack of communal

characteristics will have the same negative re-

percussions among lesbians, though, because

lesbian women may not be held to the same

heterosexual expectation to possess communal

characteristics.

TAKE HOME POINTS

■ Women are more easily influenced than men because

people adopt a more agreeable interaction style with

women than men. And, agreement leads to influence.

■ Men are more likely than women to emerge as lead-

ers in laboratory studies where participants are often

strangers and have only a brief opportunity to interact.

■ Women are more likely to display a transformational

style of leadership, whereas men are more likely to

display a transactional style of leadership. The transfor-

mational style is most effective.

■ Female leaders are judged more harshly than male

leaders when they display agentic characteristics—in

part because agentic characteristics imply a lack of com-

munion in women (but not men). This finding holds for

male rather than for female perceivers.

■ Despite the fact that women are more likely than men

to use a transformational leadership style, the style that

has been shown to be most effective, people still prefer

to have men than women as their bosses.

Emotion

Two people receive news that an accident has

caused a neighbor to lose her baby. One cries;

the other does not. You probably imagine that

the one who cries is female, the more emo-

tional sex. Two people witness some teenagers

soaping their car on Halloween. One yells

at the teenagers and chases them down the

street; the other ignores the incident. You

probably imagine the one yelling is male, the

more...themore what? Yes, anger, too, is an

emotion. So, who is the more emotional sex?

Certainly the stereotype claims women

are more emotional than men. In fact, one of

the items on the PAQ (Personal Attributes

Questionnaire) femininity scale is “very emo-

tional.” However, the femininity scale is really

a measure of communion or expressiveness

rather than emotionality. How should we

decide whether women or men are more

emotional or whether the sexes are equally

emotional? Researchers have examined three

primary sources of information to address

this issue: people’s self-reports of their expe-

rience of emotion, people’s nonverbal expres-

sions of emotion, and people’s physiological

responses to emotion stimuli. Unfortunately,

there is not a consistent pattern of findings

across these three modalities as to whether

one sex is more emotional than the other.

I review each source of information.

The Experience of Emotion

First, we can ask whether women and men

experience emotions similarly. Many in-

vestigators argue that men and women

have similar emotional experiences. Ekman

(1992) points out that there is a universal

set of emotions that both men and women

experience and common facial expressions

that generalize across the two sexes as well as

across different cultures.

Do women and men experience emo-

tions with the same frequency? We typically

address this question by asking women and

men to provide direct reports as to how of-

ten they experience a particular emotion.

Studies that use this method typically reveal

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