We explore men’s negotiation of emotional expression within larger social discourses around masculinity. Drawing on the phenomenon of men’s crying within the competitive sports context, we demonstrate that although the prevailing image of men’s emotion is one of constricted expression and experience, inexpressivity is representative neither of typical nor ideal masculinity in contemporary dominant culture. We first review the literature on prevailing cultural beliefs about normative male emotional expression, then focus on literature specific to men’s tears. Turning to a discussion (...) of masculinity and sports participation, we offer possible explanations for why counter normative emotional expressions may be particularly prevalent and public in the context of men’s competitive sports, despite wider cultural discourses that appear to discourage men’s openly expressive behavior. (shrink)

Researchers investigating gender and anger have consistently found that White women, but not White men, are evaluated unfavorably when experiencing anger in the workplace. Our project originally aimed to extend findings on White women’s, Black women’s, and White men’s workplace anger by examining whether evaluations are exacerbated or buffered by invalidating or affirming comments from others. In stark contrast to previous research on gender stereotyping and anger evaluations, however, results across four studies (N= 1,095) showed that both Black and White (...) women portrayed as experiencing anger in the workplace were evaluatedmore favorablythan White men doing so. After Study 1’s initial failure to conceptually replicate, we investigated whether perceivers’ evaluations of women’s workplace anger could have been affected by the contemporaneous cultural event of #MeToo. Supporting this possibility, we found evaluations were moderated by news engagement and beliefs that workplace opportunities are gendered. Additionally, we found invalidating comments rarely affected evaluations of a protagonist yet affirming comments tended to favorably affect evaluations. Overall, findings suggest the need for psychologists to consider the temporary, or perhaps lasting, effects of cultural events on research outcomes. (shrink)

Recent conceptual developments in the psychology of gender can be productively applied to understanding two facets of emotion: the biological manifestation of emotion and the psychological embodiment of emotion. Gender researchers distinguish between sex, the biologically based categories of female and male and gender, the psychological features that are often associated with biological states and that involve social categories rather than biological categories. In other words, the term sex is used to refer to the physical fact of primary and secondary (...) sex characteristics; the term gender is used to refer to a psychological and cultural construct, a loose translation of sex into social terms. It is proposed that two analogous facets of emotion can be identified, namely, one which is comprised of emotion's hardwired, pan-cultural, developmentally persistent qualities, the analogue to sex. The second, constructed aspect of emotion is the analogue to gender. Six dimensions on which sex and gender can be contrasted are described, and the application of each to the study of emotion is discussed. (shrink)