Language comprehension requires a simulation that uses neural systems involved in perception, action, and emotion. A review of recent literature as well as new experiments support five predictions derived from this framework. 1. Being in an emotional state congruent with sentence content facilitates sentence comprehension. 2. Because women are more reactive to sad events and men are more reactive to angry events, women understand sentences about sad events with greater facility than men, and men understand sentences about angry events with (...) greater facility than women. 3. Because it takes time to shift from one emotion to another, reading a sad sentence slows the reading of a happy sentence more for women than men, whereas reading an angry sentence slows the reading of a happy sentence more for men than for women. 4. Because sad states motivate affiliative actions and angry states motivate aggressive action, gender and emotional content of sentences interact with the response mode. 5. Because emotion simulation requires particular action systems, adapting those action systems will affect comprehension of sentences with emotional content congruent with the adapted action system. These results have implications for the study of language, emotion, and gender differences. (shrink)

In most contexts, emotional support is crucial for the well-being of low-income single women and their children. Support from women may be especially important for single mothers because of precarious ties to their children’s fathers, the prevalence of extended matrifocal living arrangements, and gendered norms that place men as providers of financial rather than emotional support. However, in contexts marked by economic insecurity, spatial dispersion of families, and changing gender norms and kinship obligations, such an expectation may be problematic. (...) Applying theories of emotional capital and family bargaining processes, we address three questions: What is the gender composition of emotional support that single mothers receive? How does gender composition change over time? Does the gender composition of emotional support affect the self-reported stress of single mothers? Drawing on data from a unique data set on 462 low-income single mothers and their kin from Nairobi, Kenya, we uncover three key findings. One, whereas the bulk of strong emotional support comes from female kin, about 20 percent of respondents report having male-dominant support networks. Two, nearly 30 percent of respondents report change favoring men in the composition of their emotional support over six months. Three, having a male-dominant emotional support network is associated with lower stress. These results challenge what is commonly taken for granted about gender norms and kinship obligations in non-Western contexts. (shrink)

Is gender-emotion stereotype a “one-hundred percent” top-down processing phenomenon, or are there additional contributions to cognitive processing from background clues when they are related to stereotypes? In the present study, we measured the gender-emotion stereotypes of 57 undergraduates with a face recall task and found that, regardless of whether the emotional expressions of distractors were congruent or incongruent with targets, people tended to misperceive the fearful faces of men as angry and the angry faces of women as fearful. In particular, (...) there was a significantly larger effect in the distractor-incongruent condition. The revised process-dissociation procedure analysis confirmed that both automatic and controlled processing have their own independent effects on gender-emotion stereotypes. This finding supports a dual-processing perspective on stereotypes and contributes to future research in both theory and methodology. (shrink)

In this article, the author examines the gendered emotional culture of high-risk takers. Drawing on five and one-half years of ethnographic fieldwork with a volunteer search and rescue group, the author details the intense emotions rescuers experienced before, during, and after the most dangerous and upsetting rescues. Lyng's concept of “edgework” is used to analyze how male and female rescuers experienced, understood, and acted on their feelings. The data reveal several gendered patterns that characterized this emotional culture. (...) The article concludes with a discussion of gender, edgework, and emotional culture, focusing on the theoretical implications of their confluence. (shrink)

The feminization of care migration in transnational contexts has received a great deal of attention. Scholars, however, have been slow to investigate a similar trend in intranational contexts. This article expands existing research on global care chains by examining the gendered emotional labor of migrant domestic workers pertaining to China’s intranational care chains. While the former often foregrounds “racial or ethnic discounting,” the latter is characterized by “citizenly discounting” whereby migrant domestic workers are subject to an overarching system of (...) alienation, subordination, and exploitation owning to their second-class rural hùkŏu status. Drawing on a participant-observation study of nannies, this article highlights how the intersection of gender and rural-urban citizenship is the key to grasping China’s migrant domestic workers’ experiences of extensive alienation at the nexus of work, family, and wider society. By delving into a particular set of political, economic, and cultural forces in the Chinese context, the article makes a distinctive contribution to a more nuanced and context-sensitive understanding of the interface of gender, emotional labor, and care migration. (shrink)

I argue that gendered stereotypes, gendered emotions and attitudes, and display rules can influence extrinsic regulation stages, making failure points likely to occur in gendered-context and for reasons that the emotion regulation literature has not given adequate attention to. As a result, I argue for ‘feminist emotional intelligence’ as a way to help escape these failures. Feminist emotional intelligence, on my view, is a nonideal ability-based approach that equips a person to effectively reason about emotions (...) through an intersectional lens and use emotions to inform how we think and react to the world. This includes being attuned to the ways in which the world and our emotional lives are structured by and favors men. It stresses the need to be attuned to, as well as resist and challenge gender-based stereotypes and attitudes around emotions, paying close attention to the ways those stereotypes, norms, and attitudes differ across race, class, ethnicity, et cetera. (shrink)

Results from studies on gender differences in emotion recognition vary, depending on the types of emotion and the sensory modalities used for stimulus presentation. This makes comparability between different studies problematic. This study investigated emotion recognition of healthy participants (N = 84; 40 males; ages 20 to 70 years), using dynamic stimuli, displayed by two genders in three different sensory modalities (auditory, visual, audio-visual) and five emotional categories. The participants were asked to categorise the stimuli on the basis of their (...) nonverbal emotional content (happy, alluring, neutral, angry, and disgusted). Hit rates and category selection biases were analysed. Women were found to be more accurate in recognition of emotional prosody. This effect was partially mediated by hearing loss for the frequency of 8,000 Hz. Moreover, there was a gender-specific selection bias for alluring stimuli: Men, as compared to women, chose “alluring” more often when a stimulus was presented by a woman as compared to a man. (shrink)

The human face conveys a myriad of social meanings within an overlapping array of features. Herein, we examine such features within the context of gender-emotion stereotypes. First we detail the pervasive set of gender-emotion expectations known to exist. We then review new research revealing that gender cues and emotion expression often share physical properties that represent a confound of overlapping features characteristic of low versus high facial maturity/dominance. As such, gender-related facial appearance and facial expression of emotions often share (...) social meaning and physical resemblance. Thus, stereotypic and phenotypic information conveyed by the face are intertwined—sometimes confounded, sometimes clashing. We discuss implications of this work for gender-emotion stereotypes, as well as for emotion and face processing more generally. (shrink)

Audiovisual communication is greatly contributing to the emerging research field of affective computing. The use of audiovisual stimuli within immersive virtual reality environments is providing very intense emotional reactions, which provoke spontaneous physical and physiological changes that can be assimilated into real responses. In order to ensure high-quality recognition, the artificial intelligence system must be trained with adequate data sets, including not only those gathered by smart sensors but also the tags related to the elicited emotion. Currently, there are very (...) few techniques available for the labeling of emotions. Among them, the Self-Assessment Manikin devised by Lang is one of the most popular. This study shows experimentally that the graphic proposal for the original SAM labelling system, as devised by Lang, is not neutral to gender and contains gender biases in its design and representation. Therefore, a new graphic design has been proposed and tested according to the guidelines of expert judges. The results of the experiment show an overall improvement in the labeling of emotions in the pleasure–arousal–dominance affective space, particularly, for women. This research proves the relevance of applying the gender perspective in the validation of tools used throughout the years. (shrink)

Well-documented differences in the psychology and behavior of men and women have spurred extensive exploration of gender's role within the brain, particularly regarding emotional processing. While neuroanatomical studies clearly show differences between the sexes, the functional effects of these differences are less understood. Neuroimaging studies have shown inconsistent locations and magnitudes of gender differences in brain hemodynamic responses to emotion. To better understand the neurophysiology of these gender differences, we analyzed recordings of single neuron activity in the human brain as (...) subjects of both genders viewed emotional expressions. This study included recordings of single-neuron activity of 14 (6 male) epileptic patients in four brain areas: amygdala (236 neurons), hippocampus ( n = 270), anterior cingulate cortex ( n = 256), and ventromedial prefrontal cortex ( n = 174). Neural activity was recorded while participants viewed a series of avatar male faces portraying positive, negative or neutral expressions. Significant gender differences were found in the left amygdala, where 23% ( n = 15∕66) of neurons in men were significantly affected by facial emotion, vs. 8% ( n = 6∕76) of neurons in women. A Fisher's exact test comparing the two ratios found a highly significant difference between the two ( p. (shrink)

Conference environments enable diverse roles for academics. However, conferences are hardly entered into by participants as equals. Academics enter into and experience professional environments differently according to culture, gender, race, ethnicity, class, and more. This paper considers from a philosophical perspective entering and initiating culturally into academic conferences as a woman. It discusses theories of gender and emotional labor and emotional management, focusing on Arlie Hochschild’s foundational work, and affect in gendered social relations, considering Sara Ahmed’s theorization of the (...) feminist killjoy and the affect alien. It applies these lenses to explore problematic experiences of women initiates at conferences. The paper proceeds with a theoretical discussion of gender, emotional labor, and affect. Then the paper discusses women academics’ experiences generally and at conferences, including educational research conferences, with reference to relevant higher education research as well as anecdotal evidence, relating these experiences to the theories. It thus aims to tie together theoretical insights, higher education scholarship, and ordinary real-life experiences of gendered social relations in conference activities. (shrink)

Conference environments enable diverse roles for academics. However, conferences are hardly entered into by participants as equals. Academics enter into and experience professional environments differently according to culture, gender, race, ethnicity, class, and more. This paper considers from a philosophical perspective entering and initiating culturally into academic conferences as a woman. It discusses theories of gender and emotional labor and emotional management, focusing on Arlie Hochschild’s foundational work, and affect in gendered social relations, considering Sara Ahmed’s theorization of the (...) feminist killjoy and the affect alien. It applies these lenses to explore problematic experiences of women initiates at conferences. The paper proceeds with a theoretical discussion of gender, emotional labor, and affect. Then the paper discusses women academics’ experiences generally and at conferences, including educational research conferences, with reference to relevant higher education researc... (shrink)

Small but significant gender differences in emotion expressions have been reported for adults, with women showing greater emotional expressivity, especially for positive emotions and internalizing negative emotions such as sadness. But when, developmentally, do these gender differences emerge? And what developmental and contextual factors influence their emergence? This article describes a developmental bio-psycho-social model of gender differences in emotion expression in childhood. Prior empirical research supporting the model, at least with mostly White middle-class U.S. samples of youth, is (...) presented. Limitations to the extant literature and future directions for research on gender and child emotion are suggested. (shrink)

The conflicting findings from the few studies conducted with regard to gender differences in the recognition of vocal expressions of emotion have left the exact nature of these differences unclear. Several investigators have argued that a comprehensive understanding of gender differences in vocal emotion recognition can only be achieved by replicating these studies while accounting for influential factors such as stimulus type, gender-balanced samples, number of encoders, decoders and emotional categories. This study aimed to account for these factors by investigating (...) whether emotion recognition from vocal expressions differs as a function of both listeners’ and speakers’ gender. A total of N = 290 participants were randomly and equally allocated to two groups. One group listened to words and pseudo-words, while the other group listened to sentences and affect bursts. Participants were asked to categorize the stimuli with respect to the expressed emotions in a fixed-choice response format. Overall, females were more accurate than males when decoding vocal emotions, however, when testing for specific emotions these differences were small in magnitude. Speakers’ gender had a significant impact on how listeners’ judged emotions from the voice. The group listening to words and pseudo-words had higher identification rates for emotions spoken by male than by female actors, whereas in the group listening to sentences and affect bursts the identification rates were higher when emotions were uttered by female than male actors. The mixed pattern for emotion-specific effects, however, indicates that, in the vocal channel, the reliability of emotion judgments is not systematically influenced by speakers’ gender and the related stereotypes of emotional expressivity. Together, these results extend previous findings by showing effects of listeners’ and speakers’ gender on the recognition of vocal emotions. They stress the importance of distinguishing these factors to explain recognition ability in the processing of emotional prosody. (shrink)

Large language models (LLMs) reflect societal norms and biases, especially about gender. While societal biases and stereotypes have been extensively researched in various NLP applications, there is a surprising gap for emotion analysis. However, emotion and gender are closely linked in societal discourse. E.g., women are often thought of as more empathetic, while men's anger is more socially accepted. To fill this gap, we present the first comprehensive study of gendered emotion attribution in five state-of-the-art LLMs (open- and closed-source). (...) We investigate whether emotions are gendered, and whether these variations are based on societal stereotypes. We prompt the models to adopt a gendered persona and attribute emotions to an event like 'When I had a serious argument with a dear person'. We then analyze the emotions generated by the models in relation to the gender-event pairs. We find that all models consistently exhibit gendered emotions, influenced by gender stereotypes. These findings are in line with established research in psychology and gender studies. Our study sheds light on the complex societal interplay between language, gender, and emotion. The reproduction of emotion stereotypes in LLMs allows us to use those models to study the topic in detail, but raises questions about the predictive use of those same LLMs for emotion applications. (shrink)

Research on emotional labor has consistently shown that women’s jobs require the suppression of anger. But in the debt settlement firms we studied, the women who negotiated with creditors were expected to express anger. We show that what made their anger acceptable was that its expression was preceded and followed by positive emotions. Women were praised for their ability to rapidly shift from anger to warmth and back to anger again. But this ability to shift emotional registers was also (...) seen by employers and coworkers as a function of women’s natural emotional plasticity, and was contrasted unfavorably with men’s emotional consistency. What was gendered was not an emotion but an emotional pattern, with the consequence that women’s emotional labor was simultaneously valued and devalued. (shrink)

Si les historiens ont étudié les émotions des premiers groupes protestants, dont les puritains, ils ne se sont pas demandé s’il pouvait y avoir des différences dans les émotions exprimées et ressenties par les hommes et les femmes appartenant à des congrégations puritaines. Cet article analyse une série de confessions consignées dans les années 1648-1649 par Thomas Shepard, qui était à la tête de l’église puritaine de Cambridge, dans le Massachusetts. Trois approches différentes sont utilisées. La première étudie les « (...) émotions basiques », la seconde examine les émotions telles que les puritains les envisageaient eux-mêmes et la troisième s’intéresse aux émotions dans le contexte de la « pratique », c’est-à-dire dans le cadre de comportements habituels. L’article démontre qu’il y avait bel et bien des différences de genre dans la vie émotionnelle de ces femmes et de ces hommes de Cambridge. (shrink)

Researchers have highlighted how gendered associations of femininity with emotional labor can complicate professional women’s attempts to exercise managerial authority. However, current understandings of how race and gender intersect in professional women’s emotional labor remain limited. We draw on 132 interviews from eight white women and 13 women of color who are novice principals. White women began the principalship wanting to establish themselves as emotionally supportive leaders who were open to others’ influence. They viewed emotional labor as existing in (...) tension with showing authority as a leader. Over time, however, most white women reported adopting more directive practices. By contrast, women of color reported beginning the principalship with a more directive, take-charge leadership style. They viewed emotional labor and authority as part of a blended project and did not talk about these two aspects of leadership as existing in tension. Over time, their self-reported leadership style changed little. We analyze our findings in light of recent theorizing about gender and intersectionality. (shrink)

Emotional regulation, understood as the skills and strategies needed to influence and/or modify the emotional experiences, has a very remarkable implication within numerous emotional and behavioral disorders in childhood and adolescence. In recent years there has been a significant increase in research on emotional regulation, however, the results are still divergent in terms of differences in emotional regulation in relation to age and gender. This study aimed to assess emotional regulation in adolescents in relation to their age and gender. Two (...) hundred and fifty-four adolescents from eight schools in the Valencian Community and aged between 9 and 16 years participated in the study. The adolescents completed the Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire and the FEEL-KJ questionnaire. We analyzed the differences in emotional regulation strategies and a latent emotional regulation variable in two age groups (9 to 12 years and 13 to 16 years) and by gender. The results suggested that children and pre-adolescents in the 9-12 year group obtained lower scores in the emotional regulation strategies than the 13-16 year group. Girls reported higher scores on the use of emotional regulation strategies when experiencing sadness, anxiety and anger than boys, and on the overall average of regulation according to these specific emotions. Age, but not gender, had a major effect on scores for the latent variable of emotion regulation. An interaction effect between age and gender was identified in the latent emotion regulation scores. Girls tended to have higher scores than boys when they were younger and lower scores than boys when they were older. These results could be relevant for designing prevention and intervention programs for adolescents and at different ages. (shrink)

The present study examined the effects of gender on the emotional responses (physiology, self-reports of emotion, and emotional facial behaviour) of European Americans (EA) and Hmong Americans (HA) while they relived past emotional events. Women were more emotionally reactive than men: They demonstrated greater changes in electrodermal reactivity overall, reported experiencing more intense emotion while reliving anger and love, and smiled more while reliving happiness and love. The pattern and magnitude of these differences were similar for EA and HA, suggesting (...) that to some degree, the effects of gender on emotional response may hold across ethnic groups. (shrink)

L’article discute l’hypothèse selon laquelle les Anciens percevaient certaines émotions comme typiquement « féminines » ou « masculines », afin de restituer à la fabrication conjointe du genre et des émotions son épaisseur chronologique, de la Grèce archaïque à la Rome impériale. L’étude attire l’attention sur les comportements sociaux face à l’émotion, sur l’importance de la vie en cité et sur l’impact du discours des orateurs antiques dans la (dé)construction de la dimension genrée des émotions.

This is a qualitative study of the role of gender and emotion in a political setting. The data are from interviews of activists and legislators, as well as from archival accounts of the debates in state legislatures about breast cancer informed consent legislation. I found that proponents for and against the legislation shared the belief that women are more emotional than men. This social belief shaped the political strategies the activists adopted and initially contributed to their effectiveness; however, their opponents (...) claimed that the women activists should be dismissed because their emotionalism made them irrational. I close by discussing Western cultural beliefs about emotions, social stereotypes regarding women, and their consequences for women activists in political arenas. (shrink)

_Retrieving Political Emotion _engages the reader in an excursion through our ancient Greek heritage to recover a concept of emotion useful for enriching political philosophy today. Focusing on _thumos_, Barbara Koziak reveals misinterpretations of the concept that have hampered recognition of its possibilities for normative theory. Then, drawing especially on Aristotle's construal of it as a general capacity for emotion and relating this to contemporary multidisciplinary work on emotion, she reformulates _thumos_ to provide a more adequate theory of political emotion, (...) as an antidote to the modern fixation on rational self-interest as the key to explaining political behavior. The book proceeds by recounting the way _thumos_ is used in Homer's _Iliad_ and Plato's _Republic_ and then showing how, while borrowing from both, Aristotle went substantially beyond them. From the _Nicomachean Ethics and Politics_ we can see the activity of _thumos_—how a person with good _thumos_ acts and through which institutions. Through the _Poetics_ we observe the characteristic disposition of _thumos_—what patterns and objects typify a person's emotional capacity in the best regime. Her reconstructed Aristotelian theory of political emotion allows Koziak in the concluding chapter to show how it can help us better understand political behavior today, as manifested in recent congressional debates on welfare reform, and through constructive engagement with feminist thinking on the "ethics of care" lead political theory to pay more attention to the importance of passions in political life. (shrink)

Women use power in more prosocial ways than men and they also engage in more emotional labor. However, these two constructs have not been previously connected. We propose that gendered emotional labor practices and pressures result in gender differences in the prosocial use of power. We integrate the literature on emotional labor with research on the psychology of power to articulate three routes through which this happens. First, women may be more adept than men at the intrapersonal and interpersonal (...) processes entailed in emotional labor practices—a skill that they can apply at all hierarchical levels. Second, given women’s stronger internal motivation to perform emotional labor, they construe power in a more interdependent manner than men, which promotes a more prosocial use of power. As a result, female powerholders tend to behave in more prosocial ways. Third, when they have power, women encounter stronger external motivation to engage in emotional labor, which effectively constrains powerful women’s behaviors in a way that fosters a more prosocial use of power. We discuss how, by promoting prosocial behavior among powerholders, emotional labor can be beneficial for subordinates and organizations, while simultaneously creating costs for individual powerholders, which may reduce women’s likelihood of actually attaining and retaining power by making high-power roles less appealing, guiding women toward less prestigious and more precarious leadership roles, draining powerful women’s time and resources without equitable rewards, and making it difficult for women to legitimize their power in the eyes of subordinates. Thus, emotional labor practices can help explain the underrepresentation of women in top leadership positions. (shrink)

Scholastic theologians made the Virgin Mary increasingly perfect over the Middle Ages in Europe. Mary became stainless, offering an impossible but ideologically useful vision of womanhood. This work offers an implicit theory of the utility and feelings of women in a Christian salvationary economy. The Virgin was put to use as a shaming technology, one that silenced and effaced women's affective lives. The shame still stands to this day, although in secularised mutated forms. This Element deploys the intellectual history of (...) medieval thought to map the moves made in codifying Mary's perfection. It then uses contemporary gender and affect theory to consider the implications of Mary's perfection within modernity, mapping the emotional regimes of the medieval past upon the present. (shrink)

Neuroscience research examining sex/gender differences aims to explain behavioral differences between men and women in terms of differences in their brains. Historically, this research has used ad hoc methods and has been conducted explicitly in order to show that prevailing gender roles were dictated by biology. I examine contemporary fMRI research on sex/gender differences in emotion processing and argue that it, too, both uses problematic methods and, in doing so, reinforces gender stereotypes.

Feminist scholars have shown that research on sex/gender differences in the brain is often used to support gender stereotypes. Scientists use a variety of methodological and interpretive strategies to make their results consistent with these stereotypes. In this paper, I analyze functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) research that examines differences between women and men in brain activity associated with emotion and show that these researchers go to great lengths to make their results consistent with the view that women are more (...) emotional than men. (shrink)

This article provides a brief overview of scholarship on gender differences in emotion and emotional well-being among adults in the United States, highlighting major substantive findings, methodological innovations, and theoretical developments that have emerged in the sociologies of emotion and mental health. Sociological research consistently finds that men report more frequent positive and less frequent negative feelings than women as well as gender differences in both the experience and expression of emotional distress. Sociologists attribute these gendered patterns of emotion (...) to the larger social, economic, and cultural context surrounding women and men. Overall, by identifying macro- and meso-level social causes of microlevel emotional processes, sociologists have made significant contributions to knowledge about gender differences in emotion and emotional well-being in the US. (shrink)