Download - Gender and gender role differences in smiling and communication consistency

Sex Roles, VoL 19, Nos. 9/10, 1988

Gender and Gender Role Differences in Smiling and Communication Consistency 1

Amy G. Halberstadt 2 Vassar College

Cynthia W. Hayes Adelphi University

Kathleen M. Pike Yale University

This paper investigates gender and gender role differences in smiling and in communication consistency across verbal and facial channels. College students" conversations about their emotional experiences were analyzed for smiling frequency and duration, and verbal transcripts were rated for degree o f positivity. Students also filled out a gender role questionnaire. Women smiled more than men, especially where discussing happy/positive topics compared to sad/negative topics. Masculinity interacted with gender to influence smiling behavior, but gender roles could not account for the gender differences in smiling. Gender differences in communication consistency also appeared; w o m e n were more consistent across channels than men were. Gender roles could not account for the gender differences in channel usage. A situational role interpretation is generated for future research.

This paper investigates gender differences in smiling behavior . It a t tempts

to replicate the widely suppor ted f inding that w o m e n general ly smile m o r e

~Some portions of this research were presented at the meeting of the Eastern Psychological As- sociation, Philadelphia, April 1983.

The authors thank the Vassar College Research Committee for financial support, Karen Littell for data collection and preparation, Martha T. Mednick for sharing her unpublished work, and Judith A. Hall, Daphne Bugental, Anthony Weston, and Steve Ellyson for many helpful comments on the manuscript.

2To whom correspondence should be addressed at Department of Psychology, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York 12601.

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0360-0025/88/11004)589506.00/0 © 1988 Plenum Publishing Corporation

590 Halberstadt, Hayes, and Pike

than men, and explores the degree to which gender roles can account for this difference between men and women. Second, it explores gender differences in the relationship between verbal and facial channels of communication: Do men and women differ in their degree of consistency across the verbal and facial channels, and if so, to what degree can gender role orientations account for the differences?

The gender difference in smiling is a clear and persistent effect; in a meta-analysis of 18 studies that reported the direction of the gender effect, females smiled more frequently in 17 studies, and significantly so in 12 of them (combined p _< 10-a; Hall, 1984). Many writers have hypothesized about the smiling gender difference, although the possibile functions and correlates of this difference have just begun to be explored (e.g., Hall & Halber- stadt, 1986).

One popular explanation for gender differences is that smiling behavior is influenced by psychological gender roles, and that women smile more than men because smiling is an integral part of the nurturant, expressive role that is socially appropriate for women to adopt (e.g., Frances, 1979; Henley & LaFrance, 1984; Weitz, 1976). Specifically, smiling ought to be associated with an interpersonal orientation, social warmth, and expressiveness, i.e., the characteristics traditionally associated with femininity.

Some related evidence suggests that this hypothesis is reasonable to test. Studies on perceptions of smiling have found smiling to be associated with perceived femininity and friendliness (Halberstadt & Saitta, 1987) and with warmth and politeness (Deutsch, LeBaron, & Fryer, 1987). Also, actual ob- servations of smiling in a laboratory study indicated that androgynous men smiled more than masculine men and feminine women smiled more than androgynous women (LaFrance & Cramen, 1980). These results suggest that femininity and smiling are positively associated for males, whereas masculinity and smiling are negatively associated for females. 3 Thus, in the present study, we examined the independent contributions of femininity and masculinity to smiling, and we considered these contributions in both men and women. As reported below, however, the relationship were not as obvious as expected.

In terms of consistency between the verbal and facial channels, the first and most well-known study examined mothers' and fathers' communications to their children (Bugental, Love, & Gianetto, 1971). The positivity of fathers' facial expressions was consistent with the positivity of their verbal statements.

aln recent years, it has been noted that the use of gender role inventories has been severely over- extended (e.g., Deaux, 1984; Spence, 1984). Although gender roles cannot he expected to explain all gender differences, they should be able to explain some differences, and the smiling difference, for the reasons described above, is a good candidate.

Smiling and Gender 591

In contrast, no relationship at all appeared for mothers, who seemed to smile without regard for the positivity of their own verbal messages. Interpreting this as evidence that women's smiling is less sincere and less trustworthy, Bugental et al. entitled their paper "Perfidious Feminine Faces," implying that the "popular notions with respect to the greater deviousness or duplici- ty of women" (Bugental, Kaswan, & Love, 1970) have justification. The image of women's smiling as nontrustworthy has become rather popular, and is reported in many articles and books on psychology and gender.

A decade later, in a study of alcoholic and nonalcoholic families, Jacob, Ritchey, Cvitkovic, and Blane (1981) found only a trend for wives to be more inconsistent than their husbands during discussions about their personal opin- ions on five topics. Noller (1982) found a nonsignificant gender difference in couples' discussions of their marriage when she controlled for their frequency of positive visual behavior and negative verbal behavior. However, no gender differences were found in two studies on families with delinquent and nondelinquent youths (Lessin & Jacob, 1979, 1984), or in a study of college students' role playing of a medical admissions interview (Mednick, Hillabrant, & Carr, 1987).

Given that the notion of women's perfidy remains popular despite these somewhat mixed results, we attempted to gather more data on gender differences in communication consistency, and to employ gender roles as possible explanations, should a difference occur. A gender role explanation is a natural extension from Bugental et al. (1971), who suggest that women's greater smiling with critical or negative statements may allow women "to meet middle-class expectations of the good mother role" (p. 318) and/or to meet expectations of them as submissive or as compliant.

In summary, our goals were to assess the gender differences in smiling and in communication consistency, and to attempt to account for gender differences with gender role explanations.

M E T H O D

Overview

Sixty-four students were videotaped while conversing for 15 minutes with one of eight confederates who were other students unknown to the subjects. After getting acquainted, each subject discussed topics s/he defined as positive or happy and as negative or sad, and listened to the confederate do the same. Students had consented to be audiotaped but were videotaped without their knowledge. After the session, students engaged in other tasks, were fully debriefed, and gave their consent for the videotapes to be used for research purposes. Twelve weeks later subjects were sent a gender role


inventory to fill out; 43 subjects returned the questionnaire. Two of the authors recorded all smiles, their duration, and their corresponding verbal statements. Four verbal statements not accompanied by a smile were also recorded for each subject. Each verbal statement was rated by 10 of 40 judges on a 7-point scale for degree of positivity. Data were then intercorrelated and subjected to analyses of variance (ANOVAs).

Subjects and Confederates

Thirty-two male and 32 female undergraduates met for the first time with one of eight (four male, four female) undergraduate confederates chosen from another university so that partners would not previously be acquainted. Ha l f of the pairs were same gender and half were cross gender (see Hal- berstadt, 1986, for methodological details and for findings regarding family expressiveness).

Procedure

The conversations were conducted in a pleasant laboratory room. The subject and confederate sat on opposite sides of a table, approximately four feet apart . The chairs were arranged so that when the subject looked at the confederate, a full-face recording was obtained by the camera behind the one-way mirror. Subjects were told that they were participating in a "pilot" study and that the "real" subjects would be family members who would experience the same procedure, i.e., conversing about emotional experiences.

Subjects and confederates participated in three types of discussion for about 5 minutes each. In the first, which the confederate always began, the participants were asked to introduce themselves and get acquainted. In the second and third discussions, both of which the subject began and the confederate finished, the participants were asked to discuss the most sad/negative and most happy/posi t ive experience that they could, while still feeling comfortable in the situation. The order of the second and third discussion choices was random, but blocked within both subject and confederate gender. The confederates ' major task was to sit in the nonvideotaped position, and to participate in as natural a way as possible. 4

*We chose not to control the confederates' nonverbal behavior for three reasons. First, when one nonverbal behavior (e.g., smiling) is controlled, other related nonverbal behaviors (e.g., eye gaze, head nods, vocal spontaneity, restless movements) must then be monitored for signs of artificiality or compensation. Second, whereas controlling confederates' nonverbal behavior might increase the likelihood of finding predicted relationships, it simultaneously reduces con- fidence in the robustness and generalizability of these relationships. Third, because of the large number of confederates and their counterbalanced order across subject gender, we thought it unlikely that subsequent effects would be due to individual idiosyncracies in confederate behavior. Analyses with individual confederates supported this assumption.


After these discussions, and a questionnaire evaluation of the "pilot" session (see Halberstadt, 1984, for further information), the subject was fully debriefed in the confederate's presence. Subjects were also informed that they could have the videotape erased; one subject chose to do so and this subject was replaced. No subject guessed that his/her partner was a confederate.

Approximately three months later all subjects were asked by mail to fill out a gender role inventory [Personal Attributes Questionnaire (PAQ); Spence, Helmreich, & Stapp, 1974]. This questionnaire is comprised of 8 unipolar male-valued (M) items, 8 unipolar female-valued (F) items, and 8 bipolar female-valued/male-valued (F-M) i tems) The M scale and M pole of the F-M scale are thought to measure instrumentality, self-assertiveness, and dominance. The F scale is thought to measure interpersonal orientation, warmth, expressiveness, and nurturance; the F pole of the F-M scale is thought to measure expressivity and emotional vulnerability (e.g., Lubin- ski, Tellegen, & Butcher, 1983; Spence, 1983; Spence & Helmreich, 1978). Forty-three questionnaires were returned, with highly similar return rates across subject and confederate gender.

Videotape Coding

Two of the authors (AGH and CWH) recorded all smiles (defined as "upward curvatures of the mouth with lips together or with teeth showing") and corresponding verbal statements from subjects' and confederates' descrip- tions of their happy/positive or sad/negative experiences. Each conversation was coded for 2 minutes or until its conclusion if it was shorter than 2 minutes. Analyses indicated no significant or near significant gender differences for subjects or confederates in overall amounts of time spent listening or talking. The minimum amount of data for all four conversations combined was 4.2 minutes; the maximum was 7.9 minutes.

The method of choosing smiles and transcripts was as follows: One rater judged the presence of smiles without audio input, so that the verbal communication accompanying the smiles would not influence her decision. When this rater signaled the presence of a smile, the second rater, wearing head- phones, recorded the verbal statement. Also, one verbal statement made without an accompanying smile was obtained approximately 30 seconds into each of the happy and sad stories told and listened to by each student. In the listen conditions, the verbal statement was made by the partner, and the issue was whether or not the subject smiled in relationship to what was be-

SAlthough Spence et al. (1974) originally called the bipolar scale a sex-specific scale and later refer to it as the M-F scale, we refer to it as F-M to indicate that low scores are associated with female-valued characteristics and high scores with male-valued characteristics.

594 Haiberstadt, Hayes, and Pike

ing said to him or her. I f the subject was smil ing 30 seconds into the s tory, the t ranscr ip t f r om the next avai lable nonsmi l ing segment was recorded .

The 1120 resul t ing verbal s ta tements were d iv ided into four sets. 6 Each set inc luded the s ta tements o f 16 subjects , b locked by confedera te gender and subject gender and r andomized within sets. F o r t y s tudents f rom two unde rg radua te ins t i tu t ions (five f rom each school per set, ha l f o f each gender) ra ted the s ta tements on a 7-poin t scale f rom very sad (1) to very happy (7).

Judges ' mean ra t ings de te rmined a s ta tement ' s score. W h e n a subject smiled more than once within a conversat ion (and most subjects did), h i s /her smiling scores were averaged for that conversa t ion . I t was in tended that each subject have four scores for smil ing (happy ta lk , h a p p y listen, sad ta lk , and sad listen) and four co r re spond ing scores for nonsmi l ing expressions; not all subjects , however , smiled in every condi t ion . 7

Two kinds o f analyses were pe r fo rmed . First , we examined the frequency and d u r a t i o n o f smil ing by gender to assess the concordance o f this sample with previous studies r epor t ing more smil ing by females than males. We also invest igated the re la t ionship between smil ing and gender roles. Second, we examined the re la t ionship between facial and verbal communica t ions ; we

wanted to assess whether or not women were less consistent across channels com- pa red to men. W e also invest igated the re la t ionsh ip between c ommun ic a - t ion consis tency and gender roles. Fo r all A N O V A s , an aggrega ted mean square er ror te rm was c o m p u t e d (Green & Tukey , 1960) to make a more sta- ble e r ror te rm.

R E S U L T S

Reliability

Raters ' agreement when ra t ing the presence o f a smile was high bo th at the beginning o f the ra t ing process (94°70, for over 100 smiles made by 7 subjects) at the end o f the s tudy (93010, for over 75 smiles made by 4 subjects) . In t e r judge re l iabi l i ty o f unde rg radua t e rat ings o f verba l s ta tements was also very high (Cronbach ' s a lphas for the four sets = .95, .95, .96, .96). 8

6After all the data were collected and judged, it was discovered that four nonsmiling expression statements had been omitted accidentally.

7The labels are based on the subject's perspective. During happy talk and sad talk, the subjects were telling either a happy or a sad story to the confederates. During happy listen and sad listen, the confederates were telling the happy or sad story and the subjects listened.

sSince the mean alpha for interjudge reliability in Bugental et al. (1971) was only .49, those authors excluded transcripts from their analysis if 2 or more of the l0 judges made ratings outside a 2-point range. We followed the same procedure, but because our interjudge reliability was so high, the more stringent group of transcripts was highly correlated with the original group [r(62) = .85, p < .001]. Thus we returned to our original group of transcripts for all further analyses, so as not to lose data unnecessarily.


Gender Differences in Smiling

Gender differences in smiling were assessed in two ways, in terms of frequency of smiles per minute and total seconds duration of smiling per minute. Table I reports the means (and standard deviations) of females' and males' smiling. Both frequency and duration suffered from heteroscedastic- ity, skewness, and kurtosis. A log (x + 1.0) transformation greatly reduced these symptoms and was used for subsequent analyses.

The ANOVA included three between-subject variables with multiple nesting and two repeated measures. Subjects were nested within confederates (two confederates per cell) and subject gender; also, confederates were nested within confederate gender. The repeated measures were conversation role (talk, listen) and topic positivity (happy, sad).

Smiling frequency and duration were highly correlated; for happy talk, sad talk, happy listen, sad listen [rs(62) = .81, .84, .79, and .92, respectively]. The frequency and duration ANOVAs also yielded extremely similar results; thus, only results from the frequency ANOVA will be reported below.

Three main effects occurred. As expected, women smiled more often per minute (mean = 2.93) than men did [mean = 1.84; F(1, 126) = 17.68, p < .005]. These rates were very similar to those reported by Duncan and Fiske (1977). Also, as would be expected, subjects smiled more often per minute during happy conversations (mean= 3.16) than during sad conversations [mean = 1.61; F(1, 126) = 47.00, p < .001]. Finally, there was a main effect for conversation role: participants smiled more often while talking (mean = 2.74) than while listening [mean = 2.03, F(1, 126) = 8.60, p < .001], regardless of whether they were telling happy or sad stories.

A Gender x Topic Positivity interaction indicated that during happy conversations, women's smiling was considerably greater than men's smiling (means = 3.99 and 2.33, respectively), but during sad conversations, women's smiling was only slightly greater than men's smiling [means = 1.86 and 1.36, respectively, F(1, 114) = 5.49, p < .05]. The means suggest that the gender gap in smiling is large for happy topics but relatively small for sad

Table 1. Mean Frequency and Duration of Smiling per Minute °

Frequency Duration

Conversation condition Females Males Females Males

Happy talk 4.51 (1.73) 2.26 (1.68) 12.95 (6.50) 5.46 (4.59) Happy listen 3.48 (2.07) 2.41 (1.63) 12.00 (8.74) 7.69 (6.86) Sad talk 2.50 (2.11) 1.70 (1.69) 6.56 (6.98) 3.84 (4.57) Sad listen 1.22 (1.45) 1.01 (1.14) 2.94 (4.03) 2.18 (3.27) Total 2.93 (1.15) 1.84 (0.96) 8.61 (4.36) 4.79 (3.31)

*Means are based on 32 females and 32 males. "Talk" and "Listen" refer to the perspective of the subjects who were conversing with confederates. Standard deviations are reported in parentheses.


conversations [ts(62) = 4.50 and 1.60, ps < .001 and .12, for happy and sad topics, respectively]. The means also suggest that women may be more responsive than men to variations in topics or the demands of the situation Its(31) = 3.32 and 8.48, ps _< .002 and .001, for men's smiling across happy and sad conversations and for women's smiling across happy and sad conversations, respectively], although we do not know whether these results are due to gender differences in underlying feelings (women may feel more in- tensely emotional about their happy stories than men) or in expression of feelings (women may be more willing than men to show their positive feelings).

Smiling and Gender Roles

Correlations of masculinity (M), femininity (F), and femininity- masculinity (F-M) scales with gender were - . 4 2 (p < .01), .15, and - . 5 6 (p < .001), respectively, with negative correlations indicating higher scores for males (see footnote 5). Intercorrelations and subjects' mean scores were similar to those reported by Spence and Helmreich (1978), and suggest the representativeness of this sample.

The influence of psychological gender roles upon smiling was examined by three ANOVAs with subject gender and gender role (low, high) as between measures, and conversational role and topic positivity as repeated measures. Subjects were assigned a "low" or "high" gender role score for each of the three ANOVAs, based on median splits calculated separately for females and males and for each gender role scale.

In addition to the previously reported smiling main effects and interactions, three trends with the gender role factors occurred, and these supported the correlations. First, a Gender x Masculinity interaction suggested that low-masculine women (mean = 3.18) and high-masculine men (mean = 2.32) smiled relatively more than high-masculine women (mean = 2.87) and low-masculine men [mean = 1.70; F(1, 39) = 3.16, p < .08]. The results for women replicate those of LaFrance and Carmen (1980), who also considered the relationship between masculinity and women's smiling. A second trend indicated a main effect for the F-M gender role; more masculine subjects (mean = 2.68) smiled more than more feminine subjects [mean = 2.31; F(1, 39) = 3.29, p < .08]. Third, a Gender x F-M interaction [F(1, 39) = 3.38, p < .07] suggested this was primarily true for men; feminine women (mean = 3.02) and masculine men (mean = 2.35) smiled relatively more than masculine women (mean = 3.01) and feminine men (mean = 1.60). Although not individually strong, these results together suggested a Gender x Gender Role interaction, such that greater smiling was associated with gender role stereotypy, especially for men.


Because gender roles appeared to influence smiling behavior, we next tested whether gender roles could account for the gender differences in smiling. For the four conversational conditions (happy talk, sad talk, happy listen, sad listen) and for total smiling we compared each gender-smiling simple product-moment correlation with its four partialed counterparts. These counterparts controlled for M, F, and F-M individually, and for all three gender roles combined. The results indicated that the partialed correlations were almost identical to the simple correlations. Thus, although gender roles seem to have their own effects on smiling, in that gender role stereotypy is associated with smiling, they cannot explain the persistent relationship between gender and smiling.

To conclude, for smiling frequency and duration, the gender difference is very clear. As found in many other studies, women smiled more frequently and longer than men did. Confederate gender had no effect on subjects' smiling behavior, but topic positivity and conversational role did; gender differences during sad conversations and while listening to a partner were much smaller than during happy conversations or while talking about one's own topics. Finally, masculinity, operationalized as instrumentality and self-assertiveness, was positively associated with men's smiling and weakly negatively associated with women's smiling; femininity, operationalized as interpersonal orientation, warmth, and expressiveness, had no relationship with smiling for women or men. 9

Gender Differences in the Relationship Between Smiling and Verbal Communications

This section analyzes our results for channel consistency. Table II reports the mean positivity (and standard deviations) of comments made by female and male subjects (talk conditions) or made to them by confederates (listen conditions), while subjects were smiling or not smiling. Descriptive analyses of these data indicated normal distributions.

Gender differences in consistency of communication across the verbal and facial channel were assessed in an ANOVA that included three between- subject variables with multiple nesting and one repeated measure. Subjects

9The lack of results for femininity is consistent with research on gender roles influences in many other behavioral domains (see Taylor & Hall, 1982) and with research on gender role influences in nonverbal behavior, such as Hall and Haiberstadt (1981). In that meta-analysis, the warmth and interpersonal orientation of femininity was not at all associated with recognizing the feelings and thoughts of others, whereas the instrumentality and interpersonal effectiveness of masculinity was positively related to the ability to judge feelings and moods.


Table I1. Mean Ratings of Positivity of Subjects' Verbalizations by Facial Expression ~

Conversational condition

Facial expression

Nonsmiling Smiling

Males Females Males Females (n = 32) (n = 32) (ns = 13-28) (ns = 21-32)

Happy talk 4.38 (1.43) 4.24 (1.10) 4.36 (0.81) 4.48 (0.55) Happy listen 4.88 (1.13) 4.06 (1.14) 4.32 (0.74) 4.59 (0.79) Sad talk 3.35 (1.43) 2.70 (1.11) 3.08 (0.65) 3.28 (0.96) Sad listen 3.41 (1.48) 3.40 (1.27) 2.78 (0.86) 3.19 (0.71) Total 4.00 (0.51) 3.60 (0.51) 3.80 (0.47) 3.97 (0.35)

"Mean ratings are based on 10 judges' ratings from 1 (very sad) to 7 (very happy). "Talk" and "Listen" refer to the perspective of the subjects who were conversing with confederates. Standard deviations are reported in parentheses. Ns were sometimes smaller in the conversational conditions for smiling because not all subjects smiled in all conditions.

were nested within confederates (two confederates per cell) and subject gender; confederates were nested within confederate gender. Facial expression (nonsmiling, smiling) was the repeated measure.

As in the Bugental et al. (1971) study, there were no main effects for gender or facial expression. Overall, subjects were no more verbally positive when conversing with female than with male confederates, nor were female subjects any more verbally positive than male subjects. Also, statements made while smiling were no more positive than those made while not smiling. Thus, the smiling gender difference reported earlier is not due to a difference in the positivity of men's and women's conversations.

Also, as in the Bugental et al. (1971) study, the only significant interaction was between gender and facial expression. In our study, however, more posi t ive statements were made when women smiled (mean = 3.97) than when they did not smile (mean = 3.60), whereas less posi t ive statements were made when men smiled (mean = 3.80) than when they did not smile [mean = 4.00, F(1, 114) = 10.48, p < .005; see Table II]. Thus, unlike the subjects in Bugen- tal et al. (1971), women were more consistent across facial and verbal channels than men were.

An additional ANOVA testing the influence of topic positivity (happy, sad) and conversational role (talk, listen) indicated that the above finding prevailed across conversation role and topic positivity, with no higher order interactions. The only other significant result was the expected main effect for positivity" conversations were much more verbally positive for happy topics (mean = 4.50) than for sad topics [mean = 3.11; F( I , 256) = 120.74, p < .001].


Consistency and Gender Roles

Although the gender differences in consistency that we obtained were unanticipated, we pursued the gender role analyses in an exploratory fashion. Subjects' M, F, and F-M scores were correlated with subjects' verbal positivity while they were smiling or not smiling, with subject gender partialled out. Briefly, masculinity, as measured by the M and F-M scales of the PAQ, was significantly associated with subjects' consistency over the verbal and facial channels, but not in anything less than a convoluted way. Low-masculine subjects of both genders were more consistent than high-masculine subjects, but for happy topics only. For sad topics, high-masculine subjects of either gender were significantly more consistent than low-masculine subjects. These results are not entirely interpretable; however, their one obvious message is that gender roles cannot account for the clear gender differences in communication consistency.

To summarize, the gender differences in consistency across communication channels is very clear and is not due to gender role differences; women were more facially and verbally consistent in these conversations and men were less consistent.

DISCUSSION

As in many other studies on smiling, women in our sample smiled more frequently and for longer duration than men did.'° Although women smiled more than men in all four conditions, the gender gap in smiling was significantly attenuated during conversations about sad experiences and when subjects were listening to others' experiences, as compared to talking about their own experiences. These results suggest the importance of situational differences in influencing the size of smiling gender differences (see also Hall & Halberstadt, 1986). They also suggest that women may be more responsive than men to situational demands; for example, women adjusted their non-

'°In addition to the many studies finding gender differences in smiling frequency, there are several studies indicating that observers evaluate those smiles differently. Men's smiles seem to be evalu- ated more positively by observers than women's smiles (Bugental et al., 1970; Noller, 1982; Shrout & Fiske, 1981). Bugental et al. (1970) suggest that gender differences in channel consistency can explain the less positive evaluation of women's smiles, but it is also possible that the differences in smiling frequency may influence the differential weighting of smiles. Pre- cisely because men's smiles are less frequent, they may be weighted more heavily (Hall, 1984); that is, observers may attribute greater meaning to or note the distinctiveness of less frequent occurrences. This sort of cognitive bias may turn out to be the primary element in the differential evaluation of men's and women's smiles.


verbal behaviors more than men did in conversations with opposite-gender partners (Weitz, 1976), and women provided different and stereotypically recognizable nonverbal behaviors to discriminate their affective messages compared to men (Noller, 1984). Because women are more skilled at send- ing nonverbal messages (Hall, 1979, 1984), they may also be better at send- ing messages that are appropriate for the situation.

Our gender role results indicated that masculinity influenced men's and women's smiling quite differently. Lochman and Allen (1981) and Frances (1979) also found different relationships between self-perceptions or personality characteristics and smiling for men and women. Although these two studies did not include instrumental or agentic items, their results together with our own suggest that women and men may smile for different reasons. Different personality traits may differentially motivate men and women: for example, instrumentality and social tension may have opposite influences upon men's and women's smiling behavior. We hope to test this in future research.

Turning to results for communication consistency, women's facial and verbal communications were more consistent than men's were, in contrast to the findings of Bugental and her colleagues (1971). We were initially tempt- ed, for the sake of symmetry, to title this paper "Perfidious Masculine Faces." Perfidy, however, is not the issue. First, that women's smiles are readily perceived as not to be trusted suggests a prevailing negative attitude about females in particular, and also suggests an implicit orientation that sees differences as necessarily reflecting well on one group and poorly on the other (Henley & LaFrance, 1984). Second, inconsistency between communication channels does not necessarily imply nonverbal treachery, but may suggest, instead, a richer, more complex communication (Hall, Mroz, & Braunwald, 1983). We might even label this as "diversity" instead of "inconsistency."

In fact, relabeling the behavior as "diversity" allows us to consider whether consistency may sometimes actually reduce communication effica- cy. For example, Mehrabian (1971) hypothesized that nonverbally positive communications may reinforce, or at least soften the impact of, verbally negative messages, thereby more successfully shaping behavior in the listening other. Also, Hall and Braunwald (1981) hypothesized that women may use one communication channel to satisfy perceived social requirements for feminine behavior, while communicating in another channel a message that is less socially acceptable. Finally, certain combinations of interchannel dis- crepancy have been advantageous in certain task-oriented situations (patient-physician interactions in Hall, Roter, & Rand, 1981; student -teacher interactions in Woolfolk, 1978), whereas interchannel consistency was associated with children's greater psychopathology and delinquency (Beakel & Mehrabian, 1969; Lessin & Jacob, 1984). Thus, the value of communication consistency vs. communication diversity may be dependent upon the situation and the goals of the interactants.


We now think that the contrasting results in Bugental et al. (1971) and our study are due to the different situations in which subjects found themselves, and the difference expectations and goals that the subjects may have had. In Bugental et al. (1971), subjects waited with their children in a university clinic for 20 minutes, and then discussed what they wanted changed in their families. This situation appears somewhat trying for mothers, who were traditionally more responsible for interpersonal caretaking in the family and more concerned about the image they presented. Mothers may have wanted to appear civil to other people, as Bugental et al. (1971) suggest, and thus they retained polite communications on their faces. Fathers, on the other hand, may not have felt the same type of pressure to repress annoyance or irritation, or to present themselves positively, and thus they communicated more consistently verbally and facially.

In the present study, subjects met other college students for the first time and immediately participated in some degree of self-disclosure. These, too, are stressful circumstances, but circumstances that call for a different kind of behavior. Here, the female role may be to more strongly emphasize facilitation and to be a warm, sensitive person who makes the interaction run smoothly (LaFrance & Mayo, 1979). The subjects believed this was a pilot study for a graduate student's dissertation and were aware of its importance to her. Female subjects, because of gender role expectations of responsivity and facilitation, and because of empathy, may have felt more motivated to create smooth interactions that would bode well for the larger important study. As better senders (Hall, 1979, 1984), they may have turned that motivation into more consistent and easily understood communications.

In contrast, males' willingness to help the researcher may well have included recognition and fulfillment of gender role expectations to minimize emotionality, since traditionally, males are not supposed to be emotionally expressive. Indeed, Weitz (1976) found that rigidly sex-typed men were more inhibited in expressing positive affect than less traditional men. Perhaps this is why males smiled less frequently, and when they did appear to express positive affect for happy events, they tended to do so in only one channel or the other, rather than simultaneously. Also, more masculine men smiled more than less masculine men during sad conversations; to develop perceptions minimizing their emotionality or to regain command of the situation, they may have tried to counter perceptions of their sadness (either reported by them or shared with them) with smiling behavior and verbal positivity. Thus, the roles for males and females suggested by the situation may have been very different, and may have led to different gender behavior as the subject sought to fulfill the roles they perceived as appropriate.

We agree with Bugental et al. (1971) with regard to gender differences in the verbal-nonverbal communication relationship. Gender differences in smiling and in communication consistency may not be located very much


in gender roles as conceived in personality terms; rather, men's and women's behavior patterns may be guided by the gender-role expectations that are inherent in the situation, and those expectations may vary with the situation. Together, the two studies suggest that we should now be- gin to construct studies of situations in which males and females perceive different norms for appropriate behavior and enact different behaviors based on those perceptions. Thus, in the future, it will be important to analyze the connection between the participants' own perceptions of the situational demands and their nonverbal behavior. Forgas's (1979) call for a science of episodes, in which we study shared meanings of different situations and also the individual differences in such episode perception, echoes a tradition in social psychology and sociology promoted by Thomas, Lewin, Brunswick, and Orne. Perhaps it is finally time to construct predictions based on subjects' perceptions of the situation rather than our own.

That men and women are differentially consistent in their use of the nonverbal and verbal channels is now the more relevant issue. The most in- teresting inquiries in the future will be the investigation of these differential female and male patterns and their meanings. That women employ the rich- ness available in the two channels to communicate diverse messages in some situations and that men do so in others makes the challenge of such inquiries all the more exciting.

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