You’re Beautiful When You Smile: How Gender Bias Shapes Perception of Expressions
Our brains prioritize opposite-gender happy faces within 120 milliseconds, revealing a deep evolutionary and social connection between emotion, attention, and gender perception.
The human brain is able to quickly detect and process faces and emotions, which are crucial for social interactions. How does gender, combined with different emotional expressions, influence early and late brain processing of faces? Although these factors have been shown to affect facial perception in previous research, how they interact remains unclear. This 2024 study investigates how binary gender influences the processing of happy, fearful, and neutral faces using Event-Related Potentials (ERPs).
The study involved 100 participants, composed of 50 men and 50 women, who completed an expression-detection task. Participants were shown men’s and women’s faces displaying happy, fearful, or neutral expressions, while the participants’ brain activity was recorded using EEG. Researchers focused on specific components like P1 (early visual processing) and LPP (attention and emotion processing), to analyze how participants’ brains responded.
The results revealed a distinct opposite-gender bias at the P1 stage (~120 milliseconds). While women had faster reaction times overall, they also showed stronger responses to men’s happy faces, while men responded more intensely to the happy faces of women. This particular bias was not present for neutral or fearful faces, highlighting happiness’s unique role in attracting attention. Finally, during the LPP stage, women’s happy faces elicited stronger responses across all participants, indicating an association between women’s faces and happy expressions. More work is needed to fully understand and analyze the implications of these results, but the brain scan data collected in this study is a step towards understanding some of our perceptions of gender.
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Study Details
Sample size(s): 100 participants (50 men, 50 women, mostly undergraduate psychology students)
Participants: People with normal or corrected-to-normal vision, aged 19 to 42, with no history of neurological or psychiatric disorders.
Design: Experiment
Reference:
Schmuck, J., Voltz, E., & Gibbons, H. (2024). You’re Beautiful When You Smile: Event-Related Brain Potential (ERP) Evidence of Early Opposite-Gender Bias in Happy Faces. Brain Sciences, 14(8), 739. https://doi.org/10.3390/brainsci14080739
Summarized by: Nadira Elmi
Graphic by: Juliette Elfar
Edited by: Margie Christ
