The Psychology of Gender 4th Edition

Communication 249

What accounts for the discrepancy in

findings between retrospective reports and

online measures of emotion? Some suggest

that women report more emotion than men

on retrospective measures because women en-

code emotion in greater detail than men. One

study showed that women scored higher than

men on a test of emotion complexity and dif-

ferentiation, which suggests that women have

more complicated representations of emotion

(Feldman, Sussman, & Zigler, 2000).

If true, why would women encode

emotion in greater detail than men? It may

be that women pay more attention to emo-

tional events than men because emotions oc-

cur within the context of relationships, and

relationships are more central to women’s

than men’s self-concepts. Richards and Gross

(2000) suggested an alternative explanation:

Men are more likely than women to suppress

emotion, which interferes with the memory

for emotional events. In support of their hy-

potheses, the authors found that people who

were randomly assigned to suppress their

emotion while watching a film (i.e., told not

to let any feelings show that they experience

during the film) had poorer memories for

the film than those who were simply told to

watch the film. As you will see in Chapter 9,

among married couples, men are more likely

than women to suppress emotion during dis-

cussions of relationship conflict.

Cross-cultural research also has exam-

ined whether there are sex differences in the

experience of emotion. Across 37 countries,

there was no sex difference in the experience

of the powerful emotions (e.g., anger; Fischer

et al., 2004). However, women around the

world were more likely than men to report

the powerless emotions—namely, fear, sad-

ness, shame, and guilt. Women’s status in the

particular country did not affect women’s re-

ports of emotions but did affect men’s reports

of emotions. In countries where women held

a higher status, such as the United States, men

reported less intense powerless emotions. The

authors suggested that power is more strongly

associated with the male role in Western than

non-Western countries. However, it appears

that the higher status of women in Western

countries does not translate into men and

women experiencing similar emotions.

The Expression of Emotion

Despite men’s and women’s similar expe-

riences of emotion, considerable evidence

supports sex differences in the expression

of emotion (Brody & Hall, 2008). Women

report they are more emotionally expres-

sive than men. Self-report data are hardly

convincing, however, because women and

men are clearly aware of the stereotypes that

women are emotional and expressive and

men are not emotional and inexpressive.

Observational data support the claim

that women are more expressive than men,

but also are not without limitations. Cod-

ers are typically not blind to respondent sex

and may rate the same face as more expres-

sive if believed to be female than male. Try

Do Gender 7.4 to see how knowledge of sex

can influence perceptions of emotion. How-

ever, other observational and physiological

data are more compelling. For example, both

women and men can more easily identify the

emotion of a female than of a male (LaFrance

& Banaji, 1992), suggesting that women’s

faces are more emotionally expressive than

men’s faces. When men and women experi-

ence similar emotions, physiological mea-

sures reveal greater facial activity in the

female face providing evidence of greater ex-

pressiveness (Thunberg & Dimberg, 2000).

Gender roles have been related to

the expression of emotion and often show

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