emotional expressivity in men and women: stereotypes and...

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Emotional expressivity in men and women: Stereotypes and self-perceptions Ursula Hess and Sacha Sene ´cal University of Quebec at Montreal, Canada Gilles Kirouac Laval University, Quebec, Canada Pedro Herrera University of Quebec at Montreal, Canada Pierre Philippot University of Louvain-La-Neuve, Belgium Robert E. Kleck Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, USA Three studies were conducted to assess prevalent stereotypes regarding men’s and women’s emotional expressivity as well as self-perceptions of their emotional behaviour. Emotion profiles were employed to assess both modal emotional reactions and secondary emotional reactions to hypothetical events and personal experiences. In Study 1 we asked how men and women in general would react to a series of hypothetical emotional events. In Study 2 we asked how participants themselves expected to react to these same situations and in Study 3 we asked participants to report a personal emotional event in narrative form. Two gender differences emerged across all three studies. Specifically, women were expected to be more likely to react with sadness to negative emotion-eliciting events in general. They also expected themselves to be more likely to react with sadness as well as to cry and to withdraw more when experiencing negative emotional events. Finally, women report more sadness when describing personal events. In contrast, men were expected to react with more happiness/serenity during negative emotional situations. Also, they expect themselves to react more frequently this way as well as to laugh and smile more and to be more relaxed in negative COGNITION AND EMOTION, 2000, 14 (5), 609–642 Please send correspondenc e and requests for reprints to Ursula Hess, Department of Psychology, University of Quebec at Montreal, P.O. Box 8888, Station A, Montreal, Qc H3C 3P8, Canada. This research was funded by grant from the Conseil de Recherche en Sciences Humaines to the first and fourth author. The authors wish to thank Nathalie Houlfort, Nathalie Collette, Vale ´rie Ve ´zina, Pascal Thibault, and Maxime Le ´vesque for their help in conducting the research described. Ó 2000 Psychology Press Ltd http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/pp/02699931.html

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Emotional expressivity in men and womenStereotypes and self-perceptions

Ursula Hess and Sacha SenecalUniversity of Quebec at Montreal Canada

Gilles KirouacLaval University Quebec Canada

Pedro HerreraUniversity of Quebec at Montreal Canada

Pierre PhilippotUniversity of Louvain-La-Neuve Belgium

Robert E KleckDartmouth College Hanover NH USA

Three studies were conducted to assess prevalent stereotypes regarding menrsquos andwomenrsquos emotional expressivity as well as self-perceptions of their emotionalbehaviour Emotion profiles were employed to assess both modal emotionalreactions and secondary emotional reactions to hypothetical events and personalexperiences In Study 1 we asked how men and women in general would react to aseries of hypothetical emotional events In Study 2 we asked how participantsthemselves expected to react to these same situations and in Study 3 we askedparticipants to report a personal emotional event in narrative form Two genderdifferences emerged across all three studies Specifically women were expected tobe more likely to react with sadness to negative emotion-eliciting events ingeneral They also expected themselves to be more likely to react with sadness aswell as to cry and to withdraw more when experiencing negative emotional eventsFinally women report more sadness when describing personal events In contrastmen were expected to react with more happinessserenity during negativeemotional situations Also they expect themselves to react more frequently thisway as well as to laugh and smile more and to be more relaxed in negative

COGNITION AND EMOTION 2000 14 (5) 609ndash642

Please send correspondenc e and requests for reprints to Ursula Hess Department of PsychologyUniversity of Quebec at Montreal PO Box 8888 Station A Montreal Qc H3C 3P8 Canada

This research was funded by grant from the Conseil de Recherche en Sciences Humaines to thefirst and fourth author The authors wish to thank Nathalie Houlfort Nathalie Collette ValerieVezina Pascal Thibault and Maxime Levesque for their help in conducting the research described

Oacute 2000 Psychology Press Ltdhttpwwwtandfcoukjournalspp02699931html

situations Finally men tend to report more happiness when describing negativepersonal events In sum the present study gives a more detailed portrayal of howmen and women are expected and expect themselves to react to specific emotionalsituations and presents some evidence that these expectations may influence theway they reconstruct emotional events from their past

One of the most consistent empirical findings in the current literature on sexdifferences regards emotional expressivity Differences in emotional express-ivity between men and women are found when considering self-reports ofemotional expressiveness when using observational studies as well as whenconsidering beliefs and stereotypes about emotional expressiveness The presentresearch investigates beliefs and stereotypes concerning emotional expressivityand investigates to what degree these beliefs and stereotypes overlap with self-perceptions of emotional expressivity as well as with personal narrativesinvolving emotional events

Stereotypical beliefs regarding emotions are culture-specific and reflect sharednotions regarding the prevalence of certain feelings and behaviours experiencedand expressed by men and women At the same time these stereotypes can alsoinfluence self-reports of emotional events based on autobiographic memory Forexample Sherman and Bessenhoff (1999) provide convincing evidence ofstereotype influences on source attributions in autobiographic memory underconditions of limited processing capacity Also Feldman-Barrett RobinPietromonaco and Eysell (1998) suggest that global self-reports of emotionalexpressivity are influenced by cultural beliefs as individuals have to summarizeover many types of events from their pastmdasha process that may lead to the use ofheuristics that bias recollections in favor of culturally shared beliefs Yetaccounts of emotional events constitute a significant part of our daily socialexchanges with friends and family members as research on emotional sharingdemonstrates (eg Rime Mesquita Philippot amp Boca 1991) This leads to thespeculation that some accounts of events that happened to us in the past and suchstatements as lsquolsquoI am one of those people who often cry when watching sad filmsrsquorsquowhich make up a significant part of our social exchanges may reflect ourculturally shared beliefs as well as actual events

Gender stereotypes of emotional expressivity

In Western cultures women are believed to be more emotionally expressive ingeneral than are men Specifically they are expected to smile more as well as toshow more sadness fear and guilt In contrast men are believed to show moreovert emotional displays only in terms of physically aggressive anger (forreviews see Brody amp Hall 1993 Fischer 1993) These gender stereotypesappear to be socialised into childrenrsquos belief systems as early as 3ndash5 years(Birnbaum 1983) Studies on the parental socialisation of emotions suggest that

610 HESS ET AL

both mothers and fathers use more varied emotion terms and more of themwhen talking to daughters than when talking to sons Further some emotionssuch as sadness are mentioned more often to daughters than to sons (AdamsKuebli Boyle amp Fivush 1995 Dunn Bretherton amp Munn 1987 Fivush1989) These socialisation practices are obviously consistent with a belief on thepart of parents that females should be more interested in emotion as well asexpressive of it than should males To the extent that this belief of greateremotional expressivity in females reflects actual behavioural differences acrossthe genders we would obviously be hesitant to label it a stereotype though astereotypical belief could ultimately be the source of the differences Whereasthose studies that have examined observed expressivity in minimal socialsituations (noninteractive) found that females tend to be somewhat moreexpressive than are males (see eg Fischer 1993) studies that have examinedactual male versus female expressivity in a larger context paint a relatively morecomplex picture (see eg Kring amp Gordon 1998)

Yet although the general gender stereotype and global self-descriptionssuggest a large difference in expressivity between men and women observeddifferences and self-reports of specific events yield little or no gender effectsFor example Feldman-Barrett et al (1998) found sex-related differences forglobal self-descriptions of emotions but not for ratings obtained in a diary studywhere participants rated their emotions following social interactions In a similarvein Jussim Milbourn and Nelson (1991) who used telephone interviews toassess self-perceptions of emotional expressivity as well as perceptions ofemotional expressivity in men and women in general found that although bothmen and women believed that women are more emotionally expressive thanmen there were little or no differences in self-perceptions This effect wasstronger for older participants than for younger participants Jussim et al (1991)interpret this finding as support for a self-fulfilling prophecy effect ofstereotypes on actual behaviour

An exception regards smiling behaviour that is both believed and observed tobe more typical for women and aggressive anger reactions which are found to bemore typical for men (see Briton amp Hall 1995 Brody amp Hall 1993 Fischer1993) However despite these exceptions evidence is accumulating thatobserved emotional expressivity depends on the details of the social situation aswell as on personality factors as has been underlined in previous research(Feldman-Barrett et al 1998 Fischer 1993 Hall 1984 LaFrance amp Banaji1992 Tucker amp Riggio 1988)

Thus when studying stereotypes and self-perceptions of emotionalexpressivity we need to distinguish three different levels First beliefs regardingthe emotional behaviour of men and women in general Second self-descriptions by men and women of emotional reactions to certain types ofspecific emotion-inducing events (eg learning that a supposed friend isspreading unpleasant rumours) and finally menrsquos and womenrsquos autobiographic

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 611

narratives of a specific emotion event All three types of reports should reflectthe influence of cultural beliefs regarding emotional expressivity but to differentdegrees The level of similarity between these different reports should help usbetter understand the prevalence and influence of these beliefs for situations inwhich people report emotions Further as Jussim et al (1991) suggestdescribing onersquos emotional experiences in terms of culturally shared beliefsabout the nature of these experiences may in the long run lead to changes in theway events are experienced

``Purersquorsquo emotions vs emotion profiles

The body of research on gender stereotypes for emotions briefly reviewedearlier is based primarily on studies that focus either on lsquolsquopurersquorsquo emotionalstates such as in studies on the self-reported frequency of experience of certainemotions on beliefs regarding the frequency with which these emotions areexperienced or on certain behavioural modes for such pure states as in studieson crying when angry

Yet lsquolsquopurersquorsquo emotional states are rare and most emotional situations elicitmore than one emotion with some being more prominent than others (Izard1972 Plutchik 1980) An interesting implication of this is that genderstereotypes regarding differences in emotional expressiveness may not onlyinvolve differences in the expression of a principal emotion (eg sadness inresponse to an irrevocable loss) but also differences regarding the presence ofsecondary emotions such as anger or guilt The presence or absence of thesesecondary emotions in a particular context is likely to have importantimplications for how individuals cope with a given event For example anassertive expression of lsquolsquoself-righteousrsquorsquo anger may not be possible whenfeelings of guilt or shame occur at the same time This suggests that a study onemotional stereotypes should focus not only on lsquolsquocorersquorsquo emotions but shouldinclude an analysis of the secondary emotions that are expected to be elicited inmen and women as well

Overview

Three studies were conducted The first assessed emotional reactions of men andwomen to various emotion-eliciting events Specifically respondents wereasked to indicate the percentage of women and men who would react with eachof nine emotions to a series of short vignettes Study 2 assessed the level towhich participantsrsquo self-perceptions of their emotional reactions paralleled thegeneral stereotypes found in Study 1 For this a subset of the vignettes used inStudy 1 were employed The participantsrsquo task was to indicate for each event thelikelihood as a percentage that they personally would react with each of thenine emotions from the emotion profile when they were confronted with thesituations described in the vignettes Finally in Study 3 participants were asked

612 HESS ET AL

to describe an event that had happened to them in the past and to indicate theemotions they had felt during the event

STUDY 1

The goal of Study 1 was to assess the beliefs held by young adults regarding theemotions likely to be expressed by men and women in specific emotion elicitingsituations Unlike previous research we were interested in assessing thesebeliefs on a lsquolsquoprofilersquorsquo measure of expressivity That is we wanted to discovernot just what individuals perceived to be the modal emotion expressed by malesand females in any given situation but also their views regarding the probabilitythat any of several other basic emotions would be expressed in that situationConsistent with previous research we expected that women would be perceivedto be more expressive of all emotions than would men with the exception ofanger Further we anticipated that the profile measure would reveal consistentgender differences in the secondary or nonmodal emotional responsesassociated with particular eliciting events

Method

Materials The emotion scenarios were taken from a large database of self-reported emotion eliciting events (ISEAR International Survey on EmotionAntecedents and Reactions)1 This database contains self-descriptions ofemotion related events from 2921 participants from 37 countries For each ofseven basic emotions events that were frequently reported as involving thisemotion were selected from the database These descriptions were translatedinto French and any reference to the gender of the protagonist was replaced witha gender neutral noun or preposition

Four men and four women then estimated on 7-point scales to whatextent each event represented each of seven core relational themes Corerelational themes (Lazarus 1991) refer to the common content of eventslikely to elicit a certain emotion (eg for sadness the core relational themeinvolves an irrevocable loss) A 7-point scale regarding the social versusindividual character of each vignette was also completed by the participantsin this pre-test Using these data four vignettes for which the target emotionaltheme was identified and which were perceived as describing social situations

1The data are part of an international project ISEAR (International Survey on EmotionAntecedent s and Reactions) initiated by Klaus Scherer University of Geneva The developmen t ofthe databank has been supported by the Maison des Sciences de lrsquoHomme (Paris France) theThyssen Foundation (Germany) and the Societe Academique de lrsquoUniversite de Geneve(Switzerland) The data bank consortium consists of Agneta Fischer (University of Amsterdam)Pierre Philippot (University of Louvain at Louvain-la-Neuve) and Harald Wallbott (University ofSalzburg) Readers interested in the databank should contact Harald Wallbot e-mailwallbottharaedvzsbgaca t or fax 43 0662 8044 5126

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 613

were chosen for each of seven basic emotions (happiness sadness feardisgust anger shame and guilt) The following is an example of a guiltvignette lsquolsquoSomeone does not fully participate in a team effort which leads toa bad result for everyone on the teamrsquorsquo An example of an anger vignette islsquolsquoSomeone learns that somebody close to him has been spreading negativerumours about himrsquorsquo (The complete set of 28 vignettes is available from thefirst author)

Dependent measures Participants were asked to indicate for nine emotions(happiness serenity sadness fear disgust contempt anger shame and guilt)the percentage of men and women as well as the percentage of Anglophonesand Francophones2 who would react by expressing each of these emotions inthe situation described in the vignette Although the stimulus events wereselected to involve only seven of these basic emotions lsquolsquoserenityrsquorsquo was added tothe rating scale to provide a second positive affective state that could be viewedas a different level of happiness lsquolsquoContemptrsquorsquo was included because someinvestigators argue that it is separable from disgust though often confused withit (Ekman amp Friesen 1986)

Participants A total of 544 male and female participants were recruitedfrom junior colleges in a suburb of a large urban centre and in a small town in arural area of Quebec Table 1 shows the number of subjects for each conditionand location

Procedure Participants completed the questionnaire in various sizedmixed-sex groups They were told that it assesses the types of emotionalreactions that we generally expect from members of various social groups Theywere informed of their right to discontinue participation at any time and for anyreason The experimenter then distributed the questionnaires explained the useof the scales and responded to any questions regarding the procedure To limitthe duration of the experiment to approximately 30 minutes so as to avoidfatigue each questionnaire contained only 8 or 12 of the 28 vignettes Thevignettes were arbitrarily divided into three sets for presentation to theparticipants those describing anger and disgust situations those for sadness andfear situations and finally those for guilt and shame situations For a third of theparticipants the four happiness vignettes were included in the set of situationsthey responded to

Data reduction and analyses The ratings for the four vignettes associatedwith each specific emotion were averaged All analyses were conducted on these

2The last two ratings served as distractors for this study and were not included in the analyses(see Eagly amp Mladinic 1989 for a similar approach)

614 HESS ET AL

means To assess differences in expected emotional reactions for men andwomen profile analyses were employed Profile analyses permit us to assesswhether emotion ratings varied as a function of the sex of the protagonist If menand women are perceived to react differently then the profiles will benonparallel If they are expected to react in a similar manner even thoughpossibly at different overall levels the profiles will be parallel Differences inthe overall level of emotional responding can be diagnosed by assessing whetherthe profiles are coincident

Results

Sex of rater The emotion expression profiles for male and femaleparticipants were compared for each of the seven emotion situations separatelyfor the rural and the urban sample and for menrsquos and womenrsquos expectedreactions The results from 26 of the resulting 28 profile analyses show that theprofiles are parallel and coincident That is male and female participantsrsquojudgements described the same emotion profiles with comparable levels for allemotions The data from male and female participants were therefore collapsedfor all further analyses

TABLE 1Number sex and location of participants as a

function of condition (Study 1)

Number of subjects

Condition Men Women Total

Anger-DisgustUrban 55 37 92Rural 31 58 89Total 86 95 181

Shame-GuiltUrban 35 56 91Rural 32 56 88Total 67 112 179

Sadness-FearUrban 55 43 98Rural 23 56 86Total 78 106 184

HappinessUrban 75 56 141Rural 45 87 132Total 120 143 263

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 615

Emotion profiles As expected distinct profiles emerged for each of theemotion themes (see Figures 1andashg) Further the profiles describing menrsquos andwomenrsquos perceived reactions were not parallel (see later) however the profileswere generally similar with regard to their major features As the focus of thepresent paper concerns sex differences we will restrict the discussion of theoverall form of the profiles to two general observations First the profiles for allnegative emotion situations show a prominent peak for the target emotion aswell as secondary peaks That is the perceived reactions to the emotional eventsused here typically involved both secondary emotions as well as a modalemotion It should be noted that an inspection of the raw data suggests that thepeaks for both modal and secondary emotions are reflected in the individualratings and are not an artefact of averaging over divergent ratings Put anotherway the derived lsquolsquoaveragersquorsquo profiles reflect those obtained from individualperceivers

As Figure 1 shows anger sadness and contempt were frequently expected toco-occur Further participants expected similar levels of shame and guilt forvignettes involving either of these specific emotions This suggests that thesetwo emotions were not well differentiated by the participants a finding that is inaccordance with the notion that in Western cultures shame and guilt are not asseparate as is the case in some other cultures (see eg Wallbott amp Scherer1994) Second the profile for the happiness-eliciting events was characterisedby the absence of any other expected emotion with the exception of a smallpercentage of occasions where serenity was also anticipated This suggests thathappiness was expected to occur as a relatively lsquolsquopurersquorsquo emotion However as acaveat one should note that only two positive emotions (happiness and serenity)were included in the list of possible emotional reactions and that serenity can beseen as a level of happiness rather than as an emotion distinct from it

Perceived sex differences To assess whether the profiles for menrsquos andwomenrsquos expected reactions to the different emotion eliciting situations wereparallel and coincident profile analyses were conducted on the mean ratings forthe four vignettes representing each emotion These analyses were conductedseparately for the rural and urban samples However the general findings for thetwo samples are identical and most post-hoc comparisons that reach significancein one sample do so in the other Therefore to facilitate the visual presentation ofthe data Figure 1 shows the data combined over the two samples However the F-values for the analyses are presented in Table 2 separately for the two samplesAll analyses and post-hoc tests were conducted with an alpha level of 05

For all emotion situations except shame and happiness profiles for menrsquos andwomenrsquos expected reactions were nonparallel for both samples (see Table 2)For shame vignettes the two profiles from the urban sample were parallelwhereas for happiness the profiles were parallel for both the urban and ruralgroups

616 HESS ET AL

(a)

(b)

Figure 1 Emotion profiles for menrsquos and womenrsquos expected emotional reaction as a function ofemotion theme (Study 1)

(Continued overleaf)

617

(c)

(d)

Figure 1 (Continued)

618

(e)

(f)

Figure 1 (Continued) (Continued overleaf)

619

In general the same differences between menrsquos and womenrsquos expectedemotional reactions were found for all negative emotion vignettes Regardless ofthe central emotion theme of the vignettes univariate post-hoc tests on theparticipantsrsquo ratings of expected anger happiness and serenity either revealedno differences in expected reactions between men and women or they revealedthat a higher percentage of men than women were expected to react with theseemotion displays Men were judged to be significantly more likely to expressanger in sadness anger shame and fear situations Further men were judged tobe significantly more likely than women to express happiness in guilt shameand sadness situations and to express serenity in guilt situations

On the other hand a different pattern emerged for participantsrsquo ratings ofexpected sadness fear disgust contempt shame and guilt For these emotionalreactions differences emerged for almost all negative emotion situations and inall cases women were expected to be more likely to react with these emotionsthan were men Specifically univariate post-hoc analyses revealed that womenwere judged to be significantly more likely to react with sadness fear and guiltin all emotion-relevant situations Further women were judged to besignificantly more likely to react with disgust and shame in all emotionsituations except for sadness situations Finally women were judged to besignificantly more likely than men to react with contempt in disgust guilt and

(g)

Figure 1 (Continued)

620 HESS ET AL

shame situations For happiness the profiles for both genders were parallel andcoincident suggesting that raters not only expected the same pattern of reactionsfrom men and women but also at the same level for each emotion

Discussion

In summary the analyses of the emotion profiles suggest the presence of clearexpectancies regarding not only the core emotion for a given type of situationbut also for the secondary emotional reactions that are expected in the situationAlthough the profiles for men and women are relatively similar with regard totheir major features a number of systematic differences in expectationsregarding menrsquos and womenrsquos emotional reactions emerged for the negativeemotion events but not for the positive

This latter finding is in contrast to the literature on the self-reportedfrequency of happiness expressionsexperiences in men and women (eg Allenamp Haccoun 1976) and with the finding that women are both believed and

TABLE 2Results of profile analyses on expected emotionalreactions for men and women in general (Study 1)

Vignettes F df p

AngerUrban 532 8175 001Rural 333 8169 001

DisgustUrban 507 8175 001Rural 461 8169 001

FearUrban 689 8187 001Rural 294 8163 004

SadnessUrban 489 8187 001Rural 267 8163 009

GuiltUrban 414 8173 001Rural 288 8167 005

ShameUrban 277 8173 007Rural 156 8167 140 (ns)

HappinessUrban 174 8273 090 (ns)Rural 127 8255 257 (ns)

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 621

observed to smile more than men (Briton amp Hall 1995) However given themultiple functions of smiles (see eg Fernandez-Dols amp Ruiz-Belda 1995Frank amp Ekman 1993 LaFrance amp Hecht 1995) differences in smiling may notreflect differences in happiness One explanation for this lack of continuity withthe existing literature is that the results of the present study are based on specificvignettes and not on global recollections Thus possible differences in real-world exposure to happiness-eliciting situations are less likely to influence ourfindings than they are to influence more global assessments

For all negative emotion events the profiles were nonparallel3 that is theratings revealed different expectations for men and women The differences areconsistent with the notion that the gender stereotype for emotional expressivenessdoes not assume women to be more expressive for all emotions For examplewomen are not expected to express more disgust and shame in sadness situationsthan are men Also women are expected to react with more contempt than aremen only in disgust guilt and shame situations while for all other situations nodifferences emerge However women are thought to express more sadness fearshame and guilt for all emotion-eliciting situations except for happiness eventsThat is regardless of the emotion theme prevalent in the vignettes women arealways expected to react with more sadness fear shame and guilt

An interesting case regards happiness as a secondary emotion in situationswith a negative core emotion The data reveal that men are typically expected toexperience more happiness in these situations than are women The differencesare strongest for guilt and shame vignettes which involve notions of cheatingand public misbehaviour and might reflect a difference in value structureinherent in the gender stereotype

In sum the results of Study 1 expand our knowledge regarding genderdifferences in emotion stereotypes by considering secondary emotionalresponses as well as modal emotional responses Specifically women are notonly expected to react with more sadness fear shame and guilt in situations forwhich these emotions are central but are expected to do so in all situationsinvolving negative affect Men on the other hand are expected to react withmore anger in a wide variety of situations involving negative affect as well aswith more happiness in some situations involving negative affect This suggeststhat the prevalent emotion stereotype describes womenrsquos predominant emotionalreactions to be more withdrawing (fear and sadness) and self-directed (shameand guilt) whereas menrsquos emotional reactions are seen as more active andaggressive

But to what degree are these general stereotypesexpectations reflected inthe self-perceptions that people have of their own emotional reactions AsJussim et alrsquos (1991) findings show self-perceptions can diverge from thecultural stereotypes Yet Jussim et al also suggest that over time these

3An exception are the shame profiles for the rural sample

622 HESS ET AL

stereotypical beliefs may act as a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy and moveself-perceptions in the direction of being consistent with the stereotype Alsoit is possible that widely held cultural beliefs become prescriptive and thuslead individuals to describe their own behaviour as being in accordance withthe stereotype Gallois (1994) in a review of emotion communication ininterpersonal situations concludes that emotion communication in suchsituations is highly rule-governed A similar perspective underlies Averillrsquos(1997) argument regarding the notion of emotion roles that have entrancerequirements such that for example a successful display of anger presupposessufficient power to adequately address the anger eliciting issue AlsoStoppard and Gruchy (1993) found that individuals anticipate costs andrewards for showing certain emotions in certain contexts Specifically womenexpect more costs when not expressing positive emotions in an lsquolsquootherrsquorsquo-oriented context whereas men expect rewards for showing positive emotionsregardless of context

Taken together these findings from diverse domains suggest that self-perceptions of emotional reactions should show a clear overlap withstereotypical expectations within any particular culture To the degree that weassume that these influences are due to recollection biases we may furtherspeculate that the overlap is less pronounced when asking about behaviouralreactions in particular social contexts than when asking for reactions inlsquolsquogeneralrsquorsquo or independent of a specific social situation Specifically as data onactual behaviour suggest relatively few sex differences in emotional behaviourwhereas the stereotype suggests a wide range of such differences differences inself-perceptions are more likely to be due to the influence of the culturalstereotypes than to actual behavioural differences between the genders Study 2is focused on an analysis of this possibility

STUDY 2

Study 1 confirmed that at least in the Quebec culture there are widely sharedbeliefs concerning how men and women differ in their emotion-relevantexpressive behaviour The central issue to be addressed in Study 2 therefore isthe degree of parallelism that exists between perceptions of how typical malesand females are perceived to respond to emotional events (Study 1) and self-perceptions of onersquos own emotional expressivity

To answer this question men and women drawn from the same population asin Study 1 were asked to indicate for each of the seven types of emotionsituations employed in Study 1 to what degree they expected to react themselveswith each of nine emotions if this event should happen to them In addition weasked participants to indicate the likelihood that they would show each of ninetypes of behaviours corresponding to the nine emotions of the emotion profileThese measures were embedded in a larger questionnaire that assessed beliefs

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 623

regarding emotional reactions of other social groups4 This placement made surethat the cultural beliefs and stereotypes held by the participants regardingemotional expressivity in general were evoked However the specific issue ofsex differences was not alluded to

Method

Participants A total of 360 students attending junior colleges in theMontreal urban region participated in the study Of these only thoseparticipants whose first language learned and still spoken was French whowere born in the province of Quebec (Canada) who had not lived outside ofQuebec for more than five consecutive years and who identified themselvesas either Canadian or Quebecois and not as a member of any other groupwere retained5 The resulting sample consisted of 289 individuals In total163 women and 126 men with a mean age of 1886 years participated ingroups of between 15 and 40 participants Of these 63 men and 85 womencompleted the emotion profiles and 63 men and 78 women completed thebehavioural reactions scale

Procedure Participants were informed of their right to discontinueparticipation at any time and for any reason The experimenter then distributedthe questionnaires The instructions as well as an example were provided on thefirst page The same instructions as employed in Study 1 were used the onlydifference being that participants were told to think about how they would reactand to indicate the likelihood in percent that they themselves would react witheach of the emotionsbehaviours indicated The same instructions were given forboth the emotion profile and the behavioural reactions scale with the onlydifference being that for the latter the word lsquolsquoemotionrsquorsquo was replaced withlsquolsquobehaviourrsquorsquo

Materials For each of seven emotions (happiness anger fear sadnessdisgust shame and guilt) two of the four vignettes employed in Study 1 wereretained Each participant responded to only one vignette for each emotion andvignettes were counterbalanced across participants

4 In the present context only data from the part of the questionnaire asking participants about howthey themselves would react in the described situation will be presented

5These selection criteria were included because the participants for Study 2 were recruited fromseveral Montreal junior colleges with an ethnically diverse population Emotion stereotypes are wellknown to differ between cultures (Kirouac amp Hess 1999) and the participants in Study 1 wererecruited from an ethnically homogenous population To ensure comparability between the twosamples it was therefore necessary to exclude participants from groups not present in the firstsample

624 HESS ET AL

Dependent measures

Emotion profiles These were computed in the same manner as in Study 1That is responses were averaged across the vignettes representing each specificemotion theme

Behavioural reactions scale This scale is intended to assess thebehavioural reactions that are expected for someone who is experiencing theemotional state in question To construct the scale a two-step procedure wasemployed

First 68 students of the University of Quebec at Montreal 54 women and 14men with a mean age of 279 years were asked to list for each of nineemotions (happiness serenity anger disgust fear contempt sadness shameand guilt) the behaviours and observable reactions they associate with eachspecific emotion The answers were compiled into frequency lists andsynonyms were grouped together The three most frequently namedbehaviours for each emotion were retained Due to overlap between someemotions this procedure yielded a list of 22 behaviours For the second step atotal of 44 participants 28 women and 16 men with a mean age of 226years were asked to rate for each behaviour and each of the nine emotionsthe likelihood of observing the behaviour in a person experiencing theemotion using a 7-point scale (1 very unlikely 7 very likely) Behavioursthat received a mean rating of 6 or above for only one emotion comprise thefinal scale

These consisted of the following items6 to laughto get excited (happiness)to trembleto freeze (fear) to hitto insultto criticise (anger) to cryto isolateoneself (sadness) to grimaceto vomit (disgust) to stareto look hard at(contempt) to smileto relaxto contemplate (serenity) to withdrawto loweronersquos headto blush (shame) to justify oneselfto apologise (guilt) On theprofile measure participants were asked to indicate the likelihood as apercentage that they would show each of the behaviours in a situation like theone described in the vignettes

Data analyses Each participant responded to one scenario for each of theseven emotions themes and used only one type of scale As in Study 1 thedata were collapsed over scenarios Because we had responses from morewomen than men for both dependent measures the data for the femaleparticipants were weighted to create equal cell sizes Profile analyses acrossthe nine emotional reactionsbehaviours were conducted to assess sexdifferences

6These items were translated from the original French by the authors

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 625

Results and discussion

As noted earlier the goal of Study 2 was to assess to what degree the self-perceptions of the men and women who participated in this study overlap withthe general stereotypes found in Study 1 To accomplish this the emotionprofiles from Study 1 were compared with the self-reported emotional profilesand with the behavioural reaction profiles collected here

Self-described emotion profiles The means and standard deviations for thenine scales of the emotion profiles for male and female participants arepresented in Table 3 A comparison of these means with those of the profilesfrom Study 1 reveals substantial similarities between the emotional reactionsexpected for oneself and those expected for men and women in general

Behavioral reactions Table 3 shows the means and standard deviations forthe nine behavioural reaction profiles These profiles represent the participantsself-report of the likelihood that they would display these specific behaviours inthe situations described by the vignettes As the focus of this paper is on sex

TABLE 3Means and standard deviations for self-perceptions of emotional reactionsbehaviours

for men and women (Study 2)

Men Women

Situation Mean SD Mean SD

AngerHappiness 262 1224 006 054Laughget excited 790 1826 429 1168Serenity 262 827 135 532Smilerelaxcontemplate 865 2068 435 1185Sadness 2359 2390 4405 3151Cryisolate oneself 935 2083 1825 2250Fear 603 1589 486 1070Tremblefreeze 332 814 630 1155Anger 6268 2873 6076 2928Hitinsultcriticise 3540 3042 2654 2873Disgust 1175 2447 1094 1997Grimacevomit 194 553 286 854Contempt 1865 2505 2102 2543Starelook hard at 2065 2718 1156 2216Shame 286 827 802 1887Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 1044 2187 1038 1642Guilt 349 826 491 1582Justify oneselfapologise 2045 3072 1761 2663

(Continued)

626 HESS ET AL

TABLE 3(Continued)

Men Women

Situation Mean SD Mean SD

DisgustHappiness 611 1714 143 575Laughget excited 1989 2669 915 1825Serenity 611 1855 208 1159Smilerelaxcontemplate 1159t 2113 578 1482Sadness 516 1537 490 1531Cryisolate oneself 073 403 346 1352Fear 373t 1066 911 2018Tremblefreeze 476t 1154 1015 1977Anger 1359 2146 1437 2521Hitinsultcriticise 1214 2210 1186 2151Disgust 5086 3257 5881 3178Grimacevomit 1167 2121 1692 2236Contempt 1798 2226 1750 2706Starelook hard at 1991 2362 1686 2363Shame 1023 1972 1683 2738Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 645 1663 1169 2337Guilt 262 937 119 378Justify oneselfapologise 992 2511 744 1924

SadnessHappiness 317 1280 412 1594Laughget excited 123 789 128 114Serenity 887t 2017 318 1456Smilerelaxcontemplate 621 1848 346 1196Sadness 7690 2816 8251 2258Cryisolate oneself 6008 3131 6736 3059Fear 849t 1820 1546 2637Tremblefreeze 1595 2763 1135 2068Anger 1825 2641 2261 2919Hitinsultcriticise 532 1399 641 1517Disgust 651t 2015 176 940Grimacevomit 790 2017 353 1318Contempt 659 2125 332 1121Starelook hard at 000 000 045 397Shame 214 1050 141 711Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 2008 2916 724 1680Guilt 1524 2494 2141 2985Justify oneselfapologise 315 1065 391 1478

FearHappiness 317 1487 006 054Laughget excited 203 1054 058 361Serenity 587 1698 082 327

(Continued overleaf)

627

TABLE 3(Continued)

Men Women

Situation Mean SD Mean SD

Smilerelaxcontemplate 1048 2243 182 666Sadness 2333 3051 2929 3588Cryisolate oneself 1306 2536 3022 3582Fear 5111 3207 7535 2715Tremblefreeze 2008 2565 3378 3378Anger 2468 3297 1954 2949Hitinsultcriticise 1222 2098 446 1410Disgust 787 1808 1006 2206Grimacevomit 429 1270 365 1115Contempt 1192 2216 1141 2078Starelook hard at 677 1822 391 1405Shame 143 470 200 615Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 1606 2579 1000 2117Guilt 794 2199 369 995Justify oneselfapologise 282 1263 276 1319

ShameHappiness 452 1596 144 1039Laughget excited 1825 2905 1387 1990Serenity 444 1492 182 1028Smilerelaxcontemplate 1206t 2333 623 1262Sadness 1151 2121 2077 2361Cryisolate oneself 334 877 426 1107Fear 1246 2431 1135 1700Tremblefreeze 776 1569 894 1491Anger 1262 2259 1432 2408Hitinsultcriticise 565 1478 314 1140Disgust 206 966 347 1244Grimacevomit 202 590 231 1086Contempt 730 1532 811 1880Starelook hard at 347 833 304 1160Shame 4819 3534 5968 2948Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 2563 2974 2885 2908Guilt 3095 3442 4788 3282Justify oneselfapologise 4379 3144 4256 3074

GuiltHappiness 1024 2432 355 1189Laughget excited 734 2259 584 1761Serenity 262 1008 223 771Smilerelaxcontemplate 645 1692 416 1409Sadness 2003t 2705 2971 3390Cryisolate oneself 960 1992 2273 2979Fear 1778 2667 2653 3305

(Continued)

628

differences we will not discuss these data in detail However two things arenoteworthy First both men and women report lower probabilities that theywould react with a certain behaviour for example lsquolsquoto laughto get excitedrsquorsquothan with the emotion that corresponds to the behaviour (happiness) Thisfinding is not unexpected as individuals do not always express their emotionsoutwardly or may have developed idiosyncratic means of expressing certainemotions Second the profile data for the behaviours resemble strongly theemotional reactions reported For example for anger the highest means arefound for to hitto insultto criticise for to cryto isolate one self and for to stare

TABLE 3(Continued)

Men Women

Situation Mean SD Mean SD

Tremblefreeze 1206 2212 1227 2024Anger 1762 2980 1926 2950Hitinsultcriticise 129 543 221 720Disgust 1248 2569 1152 2402Grimacevomit 581 1642 351 1385Contempt 1603 2857 1464 2611Starelook hard at 129 495 136 485Shame 2667 3227 5375 3467Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 1952 2472 1769 2333Guilt 5071 3885 5753 3372Justify oneselfapologise 4484 3581 4286 3608

HappinessHappiness 8913 1981 9106 1471Laughget excited 5763 3420 6069 3283Serenity 2738t 3650 3906 3797Smilerelaxcontemplate 5451 3445 4647 3432Sadness 127 946 020 123Cryisolate oneself 040 318 029 141Fear 103 372 206 680Tremblefreeze 419t 1313 090 057Anger 032 252 000 000Hitinsultcriticise 000 000 013 114Disgust 048 378 000 000Grimacevomit 000 000 000 000Contempt 081 522 000 000Starelook hard at 355 1392 147 388Shame 111 764 000 000Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 718 1905 687 1859Guilt 270 1526 000 000Justify oneselfapologise 355 1535 090 340

Note Significant differences between men and women tp lt 1 p lt 05 p lt 01 p lt 001

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 629

to look hard at which correspond to anger sadness and contempt reactionsrespectively

However a number of differences between these two types of profiles canalso be observed For example for the emotional reaction profiles for anger andsadness the second highest mean is found for guilt whereas for the behaviouralreaction profiles for these emotions the second highest mean is found for shamebehaviours (to withdrawto lower onersquos headto blush) This findings may be dueto the general confusion between shame and guilt that has been observed forWestern cultures (see eg Wallbott amp Scherer 1994)

Sex differences To assess whether male and female participants differedwith regard to their expected emotional reactions and behaviours in the differentemotion eliciting situations profile analyses were conducted on the ratings foreach emotion situation All analyses and post-hoc tests were conducted at analpha level of 05 The results are shown in Table 4

TABLE 4Results of profile analyses on self-reported likelihood

of emotional reactionsbehaviours for men andwomen (Study 2)

Vignettes F df p

AngerReactions 295 8116 005Behaviours 183 8113 079

DisgustReactions 169 8115 107Behaviours 173 8116 099

FearReactions 330 8116 002Behaviours 390 8116 001

SadnessReactions 207 8116 044Behaviours 170 8115 105

GuiltReactions 186 8117 071Behaviours 130 8115 251

ShameReactions 215 8116 037Behaviours 70 8116 689

HappinessReactions 106 8116 397Behaviours 109 8116 376

630 HESS ET AL

Emotional reactions For all emotion situations except disgust andhappiness the emotional reactions profiles were nonparallel or marginallynonparallel (see Table 4) For the nonparallel profiles post-hoc tests revealedthat a similar pattern of sex differences emerged across the different emotionthemes For happiness and serenity there were either no significant differencesbetween men and women or men reported experiencing these emotions with ahigher probability than did women Conversely for sadness fear shame andguilt there were either no significant sex differences or women reported feelingthese emotions with a higher probability than did men For anger disgust andcontempt reactions no significant differences emerged

Emotional behaviour profiles Only the fear profile was significantlynonparallel (different) for men and women The profiles for anger and disgustwere marginally nonparallel and the remaining profiles were all parallel andcoincident Thus fewer significant differences between menrsquos and womenrsquosexpected behaviours in the situations described by the vignettes were found thanwas the case for the expected emotional reactions in Studies 1 and 2 Yet it isimportant to note that the probabilities reported for the behavioural profiles werelower overall and it is thus possible that this lack of differences is due to a lackof sensitivity of the measure

As postulated based on previous research (eg Crawford Clippax OnyxGault amp Benton 1992) as well as on the emotional reactions profile womenreport a higher probability of either crying or isolating oneself in an angersituation than do men Conversely and in accordance with both the literature onanger expression (see earlier) and the results from the emotional reactionsprofile men report it more likely to hitto insultto criticise than women thoughthis difference is not significant In addition they report that they aresignificantly more likely to stareto look hard (contempt) than do women abehaviour that could also be interpreted as aggressive when shown in responseto an insult

As regards the disgust situations men report that they are more likely tolaughto get excited This sex difference matches the finding for the emotionalreactions profile but was not found in Study 1 Finally for the fear situation menreport that they are more likely to hitto insultto criticise as well as to smiletorelaxto contemplate (serenity) than do women The emotional reactions profilefor fear from this study shows that men report a higher probability of reactingwith serenity but not with anger than do women As these behaviourscorrespond to a macho or cool demeanour in a threatening situation they fit thegeneral stereotype of masculine behaviour Conversely women report to bemore likely to trembleto freeze as well as to cryto isolate one self in fearsituations

In sum although many fewer sex differences reached significance whencomparing self-reported expected behaviours for men and women the pattern of

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 631

results is largely congruent with previous findings Specifically women reporteda higher probability of showing behaviours congruent with sadness and fear thandid men whereas men reported higher probabilities for anger and serenebehaviours In addition men reported a higher probability of showing acontempt behaviour in an anger situation yet the relevant behaviour (to staretolook hard) could be interpreted as aggressive in that context

How congruent are the findings fromStudies 1 and 2

As mentioned earlier not all significant differences found in Study 1 for theexpected reactions for men and women in general were also found for self-reports of expected reactions by men and women for themselves Yet as theresults for the two studies are based on different degrees of freedomsignificance levels cannot be directly compared To assess whether stereotypicaland self-reported sex differences were of similar magnitude we computed theeffect sizes for both studies Table 5 shows Cohenrsquos d for the post-hoc

TABLE 5Cohenrsquos d for sex differences in Studies 1 and 2

Study 1 Study 2

SituationEmotionalreactions

Emotionalreactions

Emotionalbehaviours

AngerHappiness 7023Serenity 7025Sadness 203 073 041Fear 123 030Anger 7055 7030Disgust 068Contempt 7026Shame 117 7035Guilt 129

DisgustHappiness 7032 7037 7047Serenity 7045 7026 7021Sadness 095 027Fear 189 033 033AngerDisgust 160 024 024Contempt 050Shame 062 7028 026Guilt 062 020

(Continued)

632 HESS ET AL

TABLE 5(Continued)

Study 1 Study 2

SituationEmotionalreactions

Emotionalreactions

Emotionalbehaviours

SadnessHappiness 7053Serenity 7032Sadness 184 022 024Fear 171 031Anger 7065 042Disgust 7030 7025Contempt 021Shame 020 7046 054Guilt 176 022 7033

FearHappiness 7021 7030Serenity 7026 7041 7052Sadness 189 055Fear 221 082 046Anger 7084 7043Disgust 067ContemptShame 049 7026Guilt 172 7025

ShameHappiness 7045 7023Serenity 7027 7020 7031Sadness 175 041Fear 128Anger 7069Disgust 065Contempt 054Shame 154 035Guilt 153 050

GuiltHappiness 7107 7035Serenity 7051Sadness 198 032 051Fear 162 029AngerDisgust 128Contempt 075Shame 178 051Guilt 183 020

633

comparisons for each emotion in the profile for the six negative emotionsituations across the two studies For Study 1 the effect sizes for the urban andthe rural sample were combined To facilitate the reading of the table onlydifferences for which d was at least 020 (ie equivalent to a small effect) areshown In general effect sizes for Study 1 are larger than those for Study 2 Foremotional reactions the expected differences between men and women were ofmedium (gt 050) to large (gt 080) size whereas for self-perceptions the expecteddifferences between men and women were small to medium in size

The most stable sex difference across the two studies was found for sadnessboth as a core emotion in sadness vignettes and as a secondary emotion That isfor all negative emotions the general stereotype describes women as reactingwith more sadness and women also perceive themselves as reacting with moresadness andor report more sadness behaviours Further women are expected toreact with (and they self-report) more shame and guilt reactionsbehaviours inshame and guilt situations However for the other negative emotions (angerdisgust sadness and fear) men report higher levels of shame reactions or shamebehaviours (but not both) Finally fear reactions and behaviours are described asmore likely for women in general and women perceive themselves as reactingwith more fear in disgust sadness fear and guilt situations

Another very stable sex difference across studies regards happiness andserenity reactions for negative emotion vignettes Men consistently are bothexpected to react with and self-report more happiness reactions as well ashappiness behaviours for disgust fear and shame vignettes To a lesser degreethis pattern also emerges for sadness and guilt vignettes As mentioned in thediscussion of Study 1 this may reflect differences in the value structure betweenmen and women

In sum a comparison of effect sizes shows considerable consistency acrossthe two studies Specifically noteworthy is the very consistent finding for boththe stereotypical beliefs and the self-reports with regard to sadness reactionswhich are considered as more likely for women than for men for all negativeemotion situations studied

However a number of differences between the general stereotypes and theself-perceptions also emerged specifically with regard to shame reactionsWhereas women are generally believed to be more likely to react with shameto negative emotion events the self-reported likelihood for shame as aconcomitant emotion is higher for men for all situations except for guilt(given the general confusion regarding these states observed in Westerncultures this may be due to shame being a core rather than a concomitantemotion for guilt scenarios) Yet self-reported shame behaviours are morelikely for women than for men in sadness and disgust situations A possibleexplanation is that men are actively trying to not show shame reactionsmdashtoconform to the general stereotypemdashbut are aware that they nonetheless arelikely to feel shame in those situations

634 HESS ET AL

To conclude the general stereotype and self-perceptions of emotionalreactions and behaviours suggest that women react with more sadness to all typesof negative emotion events Further the stereotypes and the self-perceptions arein agreement on menrsquos greater likelihood to react with happiness and serenity to avariety of negative emotions In contrast differences between the generalstereotypes and self-perceptions emerge for shame reactions with men reportingin situations when shame is a secondary emotion a higher likelihood of shamereactions but not necessarily shame behaviours than do women

STUDY 3

The results from Study 2 suggest that the stereotypical beliefs regarding menrsquosand womenrsquos emotional reactions and behaviours in a variety of emotion-inducing situations converge with self-perceptions of menrsquos and womenrsquosemotional reactions and behaviours in those same situations This finding isconsistent with the notion that autobiographic statements that requireparticipants to summarise over a number of related experiences may be biasedby stereotypical expectations (see eg Feldman-Barrett et al 1998) This leadsto the question of whether a similar overlap can also be found for narratives ofsingle specific emotional events from the participantsrsquo past If stereotypesindeed influence the way emotional events are reconstructed in a narrative wewould expect to find that women report more sadness events and express moresadness overall as well as more intense target emotions for all but anger eventsConversely we would expect men to report more situations involving anger aswell as experiencing more happiness and serenity overall

However as Study 3 is based on personal narratives and not on standardisedvignettes such a finding could simply be due to the fact that the emotionantecedent events in a real-life setting differ for men and women To assess thispossibility we decided to measure the emotion antecedent events by means of anappraisal questionnaire that assesses the participantsrsquo perception of the emotionantecedent situation To the degree that perceptions of emotion antecedents aresimilar for men and women while reported emotional reactions differ we canconclude that observed sex differences are not due to differences in theperception of the event per se For example if womenrsquos tendency to report moresadness were due to a difference in the perception of the emotion antecedentsituation we would expect women to report more often that they did not feel thatthey could do anything to change the situation or that they had to adapt to thesituation (as sadness is generally associated with the notion of irrevocable loss)

Overview

For this study we translated and adapted a questionnaire reported by Scherer(1988) that consists of two parts The first part invites the participants todescribe an event during which they experienced an emotion The second part

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 635

asks specific questions regarding the appraisal process We added a section inwhich we asked participants to complete an emotion profile for the event Toavoid the possibility that men and women would relate narratives from widelydifferent types of situations we asked participants to describe an event related tofamily interactions This class of situations should be readily accessible to allparticipants and ensure that emotional events involving human interactionpartners were reported

Allowing participants to choose the type of emotional events they report hasseveral advantages Most importantly we can assess what type of emotionalevents men and women choose to report spontaneously It also permitsparticipants to choose a salient event for which they can recollect theinformation necessary to respond to the appraisal questions On the other handthis approach is unlikely to result in a well-balanced distribution of emotiontopics thus making it difficult or impossible to analyse the data separately fordifferent emotion themes Yet in the context of the present study we were onlyinterested in sex differences in reports and not in absolute levels of responsesStudies 1 and 2 suggest that sex differences are very stable across all negativeemotions We therefore decided to allow participants to choose the emotiontheme and analysed the data collapsed across all negative emotion themes

Method

Participants A total of 171 students 87 men and 84 women with a meanage of 1862 years participated in this study Most of the participants (147) wererecruited from an ethnically homogenous junior college in the larger Montrealurban area (Cegep Lionel-Groulx Ste-Therese Quebec Canada) and partici-pated in groups An additional 24 participants were recruited individually

Procedure The experimenter explained that the study concerned emotionalevents in peoplersquos lives Participants were informed of their right to discontinueparticipation at any time and for any reason The experimenter then distributedthe questionnaires and responded to questions regarding the procedure The tasktook between 10 and 30 minutes Most of this time difference can be attributedto the amount of detail provided in the event description that ranged from acouple of words (eg birth of my daughter) to well over a page

Dependent measures The questionnaire consisted of four parts The firstpart was an open-ended question asking the participants to describe any eventinvolving their family life that led them to experience an emotion Sadnessshame anger guilt joy fear and disgust were provided as examples ofemotions Participants were asked to give a detailed description of the situationincluding the events that led up to it their reactions and those of others presentIn addition they were asked to identify the people involved with respect to their

636 HESS ET AL

relationship with them (eg my partner my sister etc) as well as to identify themain emotion theme of the story This served to ensure that the participantsbased their answers to the following questions on a specific event and not on aclass of similar events

Emotion description The second part of the questionnaire consisted ofquestions regarding when the event happened for how long they felt theemotion and the intensity of the core emotion identified as the emotion theme ofthe story Participants were also asked to indicate whether they tried to hide orcontrol their feelings and to what degree This part also contained the emotionprofile used in Studies 1 and 2 Using this measure participants were asked toindicate to what percentage they had felt each of the nine emotions from theprofile

Appraisal questionnaire A series of questions regarding the appraisal processwere used to assess the emotion antecedent events These questions weretranslated from the questionnaire reported by Scherer (1988) Specificallyparticipants were asked to what degree they had expected the situation to occurhow pleasant or unpleasant they considered the event whether the event helpedor hindered them in achieving their aims to what degree they considered that thesituation or the event that caused the emotion was unjust or unfair whether theevent was caused by their own or by someone elsersquos behaviour to what degreethey considered that the behaviour that caused the event would be judged asimproper or immoral by their acquaintances how the event affected theirfeelings about themselves such as their self-esteem or self-confidence andfinally to what degree the event changed their relationships with the peopleinvolved (all on negative-positive 7-point bipolar scales)

In addition participants were given a list of 11 specific potential causes of theevent (caused it myself natural causes act of god etc) They also evaluatedtheir ability to act upon or to cope with the event and its consequences using ascale involving 5 options The last part of the questionnaire consisted ofquestions regarding the participantsrsquo sex their age and whether they werecurrently seeing someone in a love-based relationship and if so for how long

Results

Of the 171 reported emotion events 147 (74 reported by men and 73 reported bywomen) concerned negative emotional events Of these a total of 62 weresadness events 22 were anger events and 11 were guilt events The remainingevents were distributed over a large number of negative emotions

As expected the very low frequency of reports for specific emotion themesmade separate analyses of reports of these events unfeasible We thereforedecided to perform analyses on the data summed over all negative emotionthemes The 24 events with positive emotion themes were obviously excludedfrom these analyses

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 637

Do women report more sadness events and men more anger events Toaddress this question a chi-square test was performed on the frequency withwhich men and women labeled the reported event as a sad versus an anger eventIn line with the results of Studies 1 and 2 we found men to report more angerevents and women to report more sadness events Specifically 14 men and 8women reported anger events and 25 men and 37 women reported sad events w2

= 355 p = 06 d = 42Do women report more intense core emotions than men For the intensity of

the core emotion experienced during the event women reported significantlyhigher levels (M = 593 SD = 101) than men (M = 554 SD = 123) t(145) =222 p = 028 d = 37

Do women and men report different levels of negative emotions across theemotion profile Figure 2 presents the emotion profiles separately for men andwomen An inspection of the profiles shows that overall men report morehappinessserenity whereas women report higher levels of all other emotionsThe profiles are nonparallel F(8 137) = 5877 p lt 001 Post-hoc analysesrevealed a significant sex difference in self-reported sadness with womenreporting higher levels than men To compare the sex differences in the profiles

Figure 2 Emotion profile for menrsquos and womenrsquos self-reported emotional reactions to negativeemotion events (Study 3)

638 HESS ET AL

found in this study with those from Studies 1 and 2 effect sizes were calculatedUsing the same cut-off point as previously (small effect size d = 020) only twodifferences were found to be stable across the three studies Men report higherlevels of happiness for negative emotion events (d = 7022) and women reporthigher levels of sadness (d = 043) As the latter difference may be due to thehigher frequency of reported sadness events by women we also verified whetherwomen report higher levels of sadness when sadness events are excluded fromthe analysis An inspection of the means revealed a marginally significantdifference in the same direction M = 6472 SD = 3247 and M = 5108 SD =3684 for women and men respectively t(83) = 181 p = 074 d = 40

Are there differences in appraisal patterns between men and women Asmentioned earlier the reported differences in emotional reactions could be dueto differences in the perception of the emotion antecedent events Yet nodifferences in appraisal patterns were found suggesting that emotion antecedentevents were perceived similarly In addition despite the more frequent and moreintense reports of sadness women did not report different coping styles thanmen and did not seem to feel more helpless (38 men vs 34 women report thisreaction) In fact women more frequently report that they felt able to lsquolsquoinfluencethe situation positivelyrsquorsquo (19 women vs 9 men report this reaction though thedifference is not significant)

Discussion

Study 3 extended the study of emotion stereotypes and self-perceptions based onvignettes to narratives of emotional events that the participants had in factexperienced themselves The goal of the study was to investigate whether thefindings from Studies 1 and 2 generalise to such recollections of personal eventsThe results strongly suggest this to be the case Women again report higherlevels of sadness for negative emotion events They also report more sad eventsin general Men on the other hand report more anger events as well as morehappiness for negative emotion events as was found in both Studies 1 and 2 Yetno reported differences in appraisal or coping emerged This suggests that theobserved differences in emotional reactions are not due to a bias in the appraisalprocess nor to an inability to act upon the event

If emotion antecedents do not differ why are differences in emotionalreactions reported We suggest that such differences represent an influence ofthe general emotion stereotype on the narrative reconstruction of a personalevent This conclusion is based on the observation of a null effect and thus opento the critique that the present study lacked the power necessary to detect realdifferences in appraisal between men and women To assess this critique wecalculated the absolute mean effect size for the interval-scaled appraisalquestions to be d = 015 To achieve 80 power a sample of 1100 participantswould be needed These data underscore the very slim differences in appraisals

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 639

between men and women making it highly unlikely that the effects observed inthis study are mediated by a difference in appraisal and thus by a difference inthe perception of the underlying event

CONCLUSIONS

The present series of studies had the goal to assess general emotion stereotypesand their influence on self-perceptions of emotional reactions by men andwomen We wanted to both describe these stereotypes in more detail with regardnot only to the modal emotion for a specific event (such as sadness reactions to aloss) but also with regard to the secondary emotions present in these situationsFurther we wanted to assess to what degree such expectations for men andwomen in general are endorsed by individuals for themselves as well as whetherthey would be spontaneously reported when relating a personally experiencedevent

Two gender differences were found to be stable across all three experimentalparadigms Women are expected to be more likely to react with sadness in allnegative emotion situations they expect themselves to be more likely to reactwith sadness as well as to cry and to withdraw more and finally women reportmore sadness in personal events In contrast men are expected to react withmore happinessserenity during negative emotional situations they expectthemselves to react more frequently this way as well as to laugh and smile moreand to be more relaxed They also tend to report more happiness whendescribing negative personal events

Not all general emotion stereotypes were found in the self-perceptionsstudied in Studies 2 and 3 Specifically according to Study 1 women areexpected to be more likely to react with shame and guilt in all negative emotionsituations Yet women did not expect to do so for themselves in situations otherthan shame and guilt situations and in fact men reported to be more likely toreact with shame in a variety of situations Further men and women did notreport any differences with regard to experiences of shame and guilt during thepersonal events

Study 3 included an appraisal questionnaire to address the question whetherthe self-reported differences in emotionality between men and women are due todifferences in the appraisal of the emotion antecedent events or rather to theinfluence of the prevalent norms No differences in appraisals were detectedsuggesting that the self-reported differences may be due to the normative forcesof the general stereotype rather than to appraisal differences

It may be argued that the Study 3 is based on recollections of past events andthat self-reports of emotional experiences represent after the fact reconstructionsthat differ from the actually experienced emotions during the event (seeParkinson amp Manstead 1993) A related argument may be made for Study 2where participants had to estimate the likelihood of their emotional reactions to

640 HESS ET AL

hypothetical events (even though the latter were chosen to be common everydayevents) This may well be true Yet the question remains why did men andwomen reconstruct the events differently in terms of their emotional reactionsThe answer would then be that the prevalent emotion stereotype which islargely endorsed by the population studied influenced this reconstruction Yetas peoplesrsquo sense of self depends on their past histories this would imply thatreconstructions of emotional events in line with emotion stereotypes mayeventually lead individuals to conform more closely to these stereotypes as theybecome more and more part of their emotional history and eventually of theiremotional self

Manuscript received 30 May 1997Revised manuscript received 23 February 2000

REFERENCES

Adams S Kuebli J Boyle PA amp Fivush R (1995) Gender differences in parent-childconversations about past emotions A longitudinal investigation Sex Roles 33 309ndash323

Allen JG amp Haccoun DM (1976) Sex differences in emotionality A multidimensional approachHuman Relations 29 711ndash722

Averill JR (1997) The emotions An integrative approach In R Hogan JA Johnson amp SRBriggs (Eds) Handbook of personality psychology (pp 513ndash541) San Diego CA AcademicPress

Birnbaum DW (1983) Preschoolersrsquo stereotypes about sex differences in emotionality Areaffirmation Journal of Genetic Psychology 143 139ndash140

Briton NJ amp Hall JA (1995) Gender-based expectancies and observer judgements of smilingJournal of Nonverbal Behavior 19 49ndash65

Brody LR amp Hall JA (1993) Gender and emotion In M Lewis amp JM Haviland (Eds)Handbook of emotions (pp 447-460) New York Guilford Press

Crawford J Clippax S Onyx J Gault U amp Benton P (1992) Emotion and genderConstructing meaning from memory London Sage

Dunn J Bretherton I amp Munn P (1987) Conversations about feeling states between mothers andtheir children Developmental Psychology 23 132ndash139

Eagly AH amp Mladinic A (1989) Gender stereotypes and attitudes toward women and menPersonality and Social Psychology Bulletin 15 543ndash558

Ekman P amp Friesen W (1986) A new pan-cultural facial expression of emotion Motivation andEmotion 10 159ndash168

Feldman-Barrett L Robin L Pietromonaco PR amp Eysell KM (1998) Are women the moreemotional sex Evidence from emotional experiences in social context Cognition and Emotion12 555ndash578

Fernandez-Dols J-M amp Ruiz-Belda M-A (1995) Are smiles a sign of happiness Gold medalwinners at the Olympic Games Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 69 1113ndash1119

Fischer A (1993) Sex differences in emotionality Fact or stereotype Feminism and Psychology 3303ndash318

Fivush R (1989) Exploring differences in the emotional content of mother child conversationsabout the past Sex Roles 20 675ndash691

Frank MG amp Ekman P (1993) Not all smiles are created equal The differences betweenenjoyment and nonenjoymen t smiles [Special Issue Current issues in psychological humorresearch] Humor International Journal of Humor Research 6 9ndash26

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 641

Gallois C (1994) Group membership social rules and power A social psychologica l perspectiveon emotional communication Journal of Pragmatics 22 301ndash324

Hall JA (1984) Nonverbal sex differences Communication accuracy and expressive styleBaltimore MD Johns Hopkins University Press

Izard C (1972) Patterns of emotions A new analysis of anxiety and depression New YorkAcademic Press

Jussim L Milbourn M amp Nelson W (1991) Emotional openness Sex-role stereotypes and self-perceptions Representative Research in Social Psychology 19 35ndash52

Kirouac G amp Hess U (1999) Group membership and the decoding of nonverbal behavior In PPhilippot R Feldman amp E Coats (Eds) The social context of nonverbal behavior (pp 182ndash210) New York Cambridge University Press

Kring AM amp Gordon AH (1998) Sex differences in emotion Expression experience andphysiology Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74 686ndash703

LaFrance M amp Banaji M (1992) Toward a reconsideration of the gender-emotion relationship InMS Clark (Ed) Emotion and social behavior Review of personality and social psychology(Vol 14 pp 178ndash201) Newbury Park CA Sage

LaFrance M amp Hecht MA (1995) Why smiles generate leniency Personality and SocialPsychology Bulletin 21 207ndash214

Lazarus RS (1991) Emotion and adaptation Oxford UK Oxford University PressParkinson B amp Manstead ASR (1993) Making sense of emotion in stories and social life

Cognition and Emotion 7 295ndash323Plutchik R (1980) Emotion A psychoevolutionar y synthesis New York Harper amp RowRime B Mesquita B Philippot P amp Boca S (1991) Beyond the emotional event Six studies on

the social sharing of emotion Cognition and Emotion 5 435ndash465Scherer KR (1988) Appendix C Questionnaire used in the International Survey on Emotion

Antecedents and Reactions (ISEAR) In KR Scherer (Ed) Facets of emotion Recent researchHillsdale NJ Erlbaum

Sherman JW amp Bessenhoff GR (1999) Stereotypes as source monitoring cues On theinteraction between episodic and semantic memory Psychological Science 10 106ndash110

Stoppard JM amp Gruchy CD (1993) Gender context and expression of positive emotionPersonality and Social Psychology Bulletin 19 143ndash150

Tucker JS amp Riggio RE (1988) The role of social skills in encoding posed and spontaneousfacial expressions Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 12 87ndash97

Wallbott HG amp Scherer KR (1994) Cultural determinants in experiencing shame and guilt InJune Price Tangney amp Kurt W Fischer (Eds) Self conscious emotions The psychology of shameand guilt embarrasment and pride (pp 465ndash487) New York Guilford Press

642 HESS ET AL

situations Finally men tend to report more happiness when describing negativepersonal events In sum the present study gives a more detailed portrayal of howmen and women are expected and expect themselves to react to specific emotionalsituations and presents some evidence that these expectations may influence theway they reconstruct emotional events from their past

One of the most consistent empirical findings in the current literature on sexdifferences regards emotional expressivity Differences in emotional express-ivity between men and women are found when considering self-reports ofemotional expressiveness when using observational studies as well as whenconsidering beliefs and stereotypes about emotional expressiveness The presentresearch investigates beliefs and stereotypes concerning emotional expressivityand investigates to what degree these beliefs and stereotypes overlap with self-perceptions of emotional expressivity as well as with personal narrativesinvolving emotional events

Stereotypical beliefs regarding emotions are culture-specific and reflect sharednotions regarding the prevalence of certain feelings and behaviours experiencedand expressed by men and women At the same time these stereotypes can alsoinfluence self-reports of emotional events based on autobiographic memory Forexample Sherman and Bessenhoff (1999) provide convincing evidence ofstereotype influences on source attributions in autobiographic memory underconditions of limited processing capacity Also Feldman-Barrett RobinPietromonaco and Eysell (1998) suggest that global self-reports of emotionalexpressivity are influenced by cultural beliefs as individuals have to summarizeover many types of events from their pastmdasha process that may lead to the use ofheuristics that bias recollections in favor of culturally shared beliefs Yetaccounts of emotional events constitute a significant part of our daily socialexchanges with friends and family members as research on emotional sharingdemonstrates (eg Rime Mesquita Philippot amp Boca 1991) This leads to thespeculation that some accounts of events that happened to us in the past and suchstatements as lsquolsquoI am one of those people who often cry when watching sad filmsrsquorsquowhich make up a significant part of our social exchanges may reflect ourculturally shared beliefs as well as actual events

Gender stereotypes of emotional expressivity

In Western cultures women are believed to be more emotionally expressive ingeneral than are men Specifically they are expected to smile more as well as toshow more sadness fear and guilt In contrast men are believed to show moreovert emotional displays only in terms of physically aggressive anger (forreviews see Brody amp Hall 1993 Fischer 1993) These gender stereotypesappear to be socialised into childrenrsquos belief systems as early as 3ndash5 years(Birnbaum 1983) Studies on the parental socialisation of emotions suggest that

610 HESS ET AL

both mothers and fathers use more varied emotion terms and more of themwhen talking to daughters than when talking to sons Further some emotionssuch as sadness are mentioned more often to daughters than to sons (AdamsKuebli Boyle amp Fivush 1995 Dunn Bretherton amp Munn 1987 Fivush1989) These socialisation practices are obviously consistent with a belief on thepart of parents that females should be more interested in emotion as well asexpressive of it than should males To the extent that this belief of greateremotional expressivity in females reflects actual behavioural differences acrossthe genders we would obviously be hesitant to label it a stereotype though astereotypical belief could ultimately be the source of the differences Whereasthose studies that have examined observed expressivity in minimal socialsituations (noninteractive) found that females tend to be somewhat moreexpressive than are males (see eg Fischer 1993) studies that have examinedactual male versus female expressivity in a larger context paint a relatively morecomplex picture (see eg Kring amp Gordon 1998)

Yet although the general gender stereotype and global self-descriptionssuggest a large difference in expressivity between men and women observeddifferences and self-reports of specific events yield little or no gender effectsFor example Feldman-Barrett et al (1998) found sex-related differences forglobal self-descriptions of emotions but not for ratings obtained in a diary studywhere participants rated their emotions following social interactions In a similarvein Jussim Milbourn and Nelson (1991) who used telephone interviews toassess self-perceptions of emotional expressivity as well as perceptions ofemotional expressivity in men and women in general found that although bothmen and women believed that women are more emotionally expressive thanmen there were little or no differences in self-perceptions This effect wasstronger for older participants than for younger participants Jussim et al (1991)interpret this finding as support for a self-fulfilling prophecy effect ofstereotypes on actual behaviour

An exception regards smiling behaviour that is both believed and observed tobe more typical for women and aggressive anger reactions which are found to bemore typical for men (see Briton amp Hall 1995 Brody amp Hall 1993 Fischer1993) However despite these exceptions evidence is accumulating thatobserved emotional expressivity depends on the details of the social situation aswell as on personality factors as has been underlined in previous research(Feldman-Barrett et al 1998 Fischer 1993 Hall 1984 LaFrance amp Banaji1992 Tucker amp Riggio 1988)

Thus when studying stereotypes and self-perceptions of emotionalexpressivity we need to distinguish three different levels First beliefs regardingthe emotional behaviour of men and women in general Second self-descriptions by men and women of emotional reactions to certain types ofspecific emotion-inducing events (eg learning that a supposed friend isspreading unpleasant rumours) and finally menrsquos and womenrsquos autobiographic

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 611

narratives of a specific emotion event All three types of reports should reflectthe influence of cultural beliefs regarding emotional expressivity but to differentdegrees The level of similarity between these different reports should help usbetter understand the prevalence and influence of these beliefs for situations inwhich people report emotions Further as Jussim et al (1991) suggestdescribing onersquos emotional experiences in terms of culturally shared beliefsabout the nature of these experiences may in the long run lead to changes in theway events are experienced

``Purersquorsquo emotions vs emotion profiles

The body of research on gender stereotypes for emotions briefly reviewedearlier is based primarily on studies that focus either on lsquolsquopurersquorsquo emotionalstates such as in studies on the self-reported frequency of experience of certainemotions on beliefs regarding the frequency with which these emotions areexperienced or on certain behavioural modes for such pure states as in studieson crying when angry

Yet lsquolsquopurersquorsquo emotional states are rare and most emotional situations elicitmore than one emotion with some being more prominent than others (Izard1972 Plutchik 1980) An interesting implication of this is that genderstereotypes regarding differences in emotional expressiveness may not onlyinvolve differences in the expression of a principal emotion (eg sadness inresponse to an irrevocable loss) but also differences regarding the presence ofsecondary emotions such as anger or guilt The presence or absence of thesesecondary emotions in a particular context is likely to have importantimplications for how individuals cope with a given event For example anassertive expression of lsquolsquoself-righteousrsquorsquo anger may not be possible whenfeelings of guilt or shame occur at the same time This suggests that a study onemotional stereotypes should focus not only on lsquolsquocorersquorsquo emotions but shouldinclude an analysis of the secondary emotions that are expected to be elicited inmen and women as well

Overview

Three studies were conducted The first assessed emotional reactions of men andwomen to various emotion-eliciting events Specifically respondents wereasked to indicate the percentage of women and men who would react with eachof nine emotions to a series of short vignettes Study 2 assessed the level towhich participantsrsquo self-perceptions of their emotional reactions paralleled thegeneral stereotypes found in Study 1 For this a subset of the vignettes used inStudy 1 were employed The participantsrsquo task was to indicate for each event thelikelihood as a percentage that they personally would react with each of thenine emotions from the emotion profile when they were confronted with thesituations described in the vignettes Finally in Study 3 participants were asked

612 HESS ET AL

to describe an event that had happened to them in the past and to indicate theemotions they had felt during the event

STUDY 1

The goal of Study 1 was to assess the beliefs held by young adults regarding theemotions likely to be expressed by men and women in specific emotion elicitingsituations Unlike previous research we were interested in assessing thesebeliefs on a lsquolsquoprofilersquorsquo measure of expressivity That is we wanted to discovernot just what individuals perceived to be the modal emotion expressed by malesand females in any given situation but also their views regarding the probabilitythat any of several other basic emotions would be expressed in that situationConsistent with previous research we expected that women would be perceivedto be more expressive of all emotions than would men with the exception ofanger Further we anticipated that the profile measure would reveal consistentgender differences in the secondary or nonmodal emotional responsesassociated with particular eliciting events

Method

Materials The emotion scenarios were taken from a large database of self-reported emotion eliciting events (ISEAR International Survey on EmotionAntecedents and Reactions)1 This database contains self-descriptions ofemotion related events from 2921 participants from 37 countries For each ofseven basic emotions events that were frequently reported as involving thisemotion were selected from the database These descriptions were translatedinto French and any reference to the gender of the protagonist was replaced witha gender neutral noun or preposition

Four men and four women then estimated on 7-point scales to whatextent each event represented each of seven core relational themes Corerelational themes (Lazarus 1991) refer to the common content of eventslikely to elicit a certain emotion (eg for sadness the core relational themeinvolves an irrevocable loss) A 7-point scale regarding the social versusindividual character of each vignette was also completed by the participantsin this pre-test Using these data four vignettes for which the target emotionaltheme was identified and which were perceived as describing social situations

1The data are part of an international project ISEAR (International Survey on EmotionAntecedent s and Reactions) initiated by Klaus Scherer University of Geneva The developmen t ofthe databank has been supported by the Maison des Sciences de lrsquoHomme (Paris France) theThyssen Foundation (Germany) and the Societe Academique de lrsquoUniversite de Geneve(Switzerland) The data bank consortium consists of Agneta Fischer (University of Amsterdam)Pierre Philippot (University of Louvain at Louvain-la-Neuve) and Harald Wallbott (University ofSalzburg) Readers interested in the databank should contact Harald Wallbot e-mailwallbottharaedvzsbgaca t or fax 43 0662 8044 5126

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 613

were chosen for each of seven basic emotions (happiness sadness feardisgust anger shame and guilt) The following is an example of a guiltvignette lsquolsquoSomeone does not fully participate in a team effort which leads toa bad result for everyone on the teamrsquorsquo An example of an anger vignette islsquolsquoSomeone learns that somebody close to him has been spreading negativerumours about himrsquorsquo (The complete set of 28 vignettes is available from thefirst author)

Dependent measures Participants were asked to indicate for nine emotions(happiness serenity sadness fear disgust contempt anger shame and guilt)the percentage of men and women as well as the percentage of Anglophonesand Francophones2 who would react by expressing each of these emotions inthe situation described in the vignette Although the stimulus events wereselected to involve only seven of these basic emotions lsquolsquoserenityrsquorsquo was added tothe rating scale to provide a second positive affective state that could be viewedas a different level of happiness lsquolsquoContemptrsquorsquo was included because someinvestigators argue that it is separable from disgust though often confused withit (Ekman amp Friesen 1986)

Participants A total of 544 male and female participants were recruitedfrom junior colleges in a suburb of a large urban centre and in a small town in arural area of Quebec Table 1 shows the number of subjects for each conditionand location

Procedure Participants completed the questionnaire in various sizedmixed-sex groups They were told that it assesses the types of emotionalreactions that we generally expect from members of various social groups Theywere informed of their right to discontinue participation at any time and for anyreason The experimenter then distributed the questionnaires explained the useof the scales and responded to any questions regarding the procedure To limitthe duration of the experiment to approximately 30 minutes so as to avoidfatigue each questionnaire contained only 8 or 12 of the 28 vignettes Thevignettes were arbitrarily divided into three sets for presentation to theparticipants those describing anger and disgust situations those for sadness andfear situations and finally those for guilt and shame situations For a third of theparticipants the four happiness vignettes were included in the set of situationsthey responded to

Data reduction and analyses The ratings for the four vignettes associatedwith each specific emotion were averaged All analyses were conducted on these

2The last two ratings served as distractors for this study and were not included in the analyses(see Eagly amp Mladinic 1989 for a similar approach)

614 HESS ET AL

means To assess differences in expected emotional reactions for men andwomen profile analyses were employed Profile analyses permit us to assesswhether emotion ratings varied as a function of the sex of the protagonist If menand women are perceived to react differently then the profiles will benonparallel If they are expected to react in a similar manner even thoughpossibly at different overall levels the profiles will be parallel Differences inthe overall level of emotional responding can be diagnosed by assessing whetherthe profiles are coincident

Results

Sex of rater The emotion expression profiles for male and femaleparticipants were compared for each of the seven emotion situations separatelyfor the rural and the urban sample and for menrsquos and womenrsquos expectedreactions The results from 26 of the resulting 28 profile analyses show that theprofiles are parallel and coincident That is male and female participantsrsquojudgements described the same emotion profiles with comparable levels for allemotions The data from male and female participants were therefore collapsedfor all further analyses

TABLE 1Number sex and location of participants as a

function of condition (Study 1)

Number of subjects

Condition Men Women Total

Anger-DisgustUrban 55 37 92Rural 31 58 89Total 86 95 181

Shame-GuiltUrban 35 56 91Rural 32 56 88Total 67 112 179

Sadness-FearUrban 55 43 98Rural 23 56 86Total 78 106 184

HappinessUrban 75 56 141Rural 45 87 132Total 120 143 263

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 615

Emotion profiles As expected distinct profiles emerged for each of theemotion themes (see Figures 1andashg) Further the profiles describing menrsquos andwomenrsquos perceived reactions were not parallel (see later) however the profileswere generally similar with regard to their major features As the focus of thepresent paper concerns sex differences we will restrict the discussion of theoverall form of the profiles to two general observations First the profiles for allnegative emotion situations show a prominent peak for the target emotion aswell as secondary peaks That is the perceived reactions to the emotional eventsused here typically involved both secondary emotions as well as a modalemotion It should be noted that an inspection of the raw data suggests that thepeaks for both modal and secondary emotions are reflected in the individualratings and are not an artefact of averaging over divergent ratings Put anotherway the derived lsquolsquoaveragersquorsquo profiles reflect those obtained from individualperceivers

As Figure 1 shows anger sadness and contempt were frequently expected toco-occur Further participants expected similar levels of shame and guilt forvignettes involving either of these specific emotions This suggests that thesetwo emotions were not well differentiated by the participants a finding that is inaccordance with the notion that in Western cultures shame and guilt are not asseparate as is the case in some other cultures (see eg Wallbott amp Scherer1994) Second the profile for the happiness-eliciting events was characterisedby the absence of any other expected emotion with the exception of a smallpercentage of occasions where serenity was also anticipated This suggests thathappiness was expected to occur as a relatively lsquolsquopurersquorsquo emotion However as acaveat one should note that only two positive emotions (happiness and serenity)were included in the list of possible emotional reactions and that serenity can beseen as a level of happiness rather than as an emotion distinct from it

Perceived sex differences To assess whether the profiles for menrsquos andwomenrsquos expected reactions to the different emotion eliciting situations wereparallel and coincident profile analyses were conducted on the mean ratings forthe four vignettes representing each emotion These analyses were conductedseparately for the rural and urban samples However the general findings for thetwo samples are identical and most post-hoc comparisons that reach significancein one sample do so in the other Therefore to facilitate the visual presentation ofthe data Figure 1 shows the data combined over the two samples However the F-values for the analyses are presented in Table 2 separately for the two samplesAll analyses and post-hoc tests were conducted with an alpha level of 05

For all emotion situations except shame and happiness profiles for menrsquos andwomenrsquos expected reactions were nonparallel for both samples (see Table 2)For shame vignettes the two profiles from the urban sample were parallelwhereas for happiness the profiles were parallel for both the urban and ruralgroups

616 HESS ET AL

(a)

(b)

Figure 1 Emotion profiles for menrsquos and womenrsquos expected emotional reaction as a function ofemotion theme (Study 1)

(Continued overleaf)

617

(c)

(d)

Figure 1 (Continued)

618

(e)

(f)

Figure 1 (Continued) (Continued overleaf)

619

In general the same differences between menrsquos and womenrsquos expectedemotional reactions were found for all negative emotion vignettes Regardless ofthe central emotion theme of the vignettes univariate post-hoc tests on theparticipantsrsquo ratings of expected anger happiness and serenity either revealedno differences in expected reactions between men and women or they revealedthat a higher percentage of men than women were expected to react with theseemotion displays Men were judged to be significantly more likely to expressanger in sadness anger shame and fear situations Further men were judged tobe significantly more likely than women to express happiness in guilt shameand sadness situations and to express serenity in guilt situations

On the other hand a different pattern emerged for participantsrsquo ratings ofexpected sadness fear disgust contempt shame and guilt For these emotionalreactions differences emerged for almost all negative emotion situations and inall cases women were expected to be more likely to react with these emotionsthan were men Specifically univariate post-hoc analyses revealed that womenwere judged to be significantly more likely to react with sadness fear and guiltin all emotion-relevant situations Further women were judged to besignificantly more likely to react with disgust and shame in all emotionsituations except for sadness situations Finally women were judged to besignificantly more likely than men to react with contempt in disgust guilt and

(g)

Figure 1 (Continued)

620 HESS ET AL

shame situations For happiness the profiles for both genders were parallel andcoincident suggesting that raters not only expected the same pattern of reactionsfrom men and women but also at the same level for each emotion

Discussion

In summary the analyses of the emotion profiles suggest the presence of clearexpectancies regarding not only the core emotion for a given type of situationbut also for the secondary emotional reactions that are expected in the situationAlthough the profiles for men and women are relatively similar with regard totheir major features a number of systematic differences in expectationsregarding menrsquos and womenrsquos emotional reactions emerged for the negativeemotion events but not for the positive

This latter finding is in contrast to the literature on the self-reportedfrequency of happiness expressionsexperiences in men and women (eg Allenamp Haccoun 1976) and with the finding that women are both believed and

TABLE 2Results of profile analyses on expected emotionalreactions for men and women in general (Study 1)

Vignettes F df p

AngerUrban 532 8175 001Rural 333 8169 001

DisgustUrban 507 8175 001Rural 461 8169 001

FearUrban 689 8187 001Rural 294 8163 004

SadnessUrban 489 8187 001Rural 267 8163 009

GuiltUrban 414 8173 001Rural 288 8167 005

ShameUrban 277 8173 007Rural 156 8167 140 (ns)

HappinessUrban 174 8273 090 (ns)Rural 127 8255 257 (ns)

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 621

observed to smile more than men (Briton amp Hall 1995) However given themultiple functions of smiles (see eg Fernandez-Dols amp Ruiz-Belda 1995Frank amp Ekman 1993 LaFrance amp Hecht 1995) differences in smiling may notreflect differences in happiness One explanation for this lack of continuity withthe existing literature is that the results of the present study are based on specificvignettes and not on global recollections Thus possible differences in real-world exposure to happiness-eliciting situations are less likely to influence ourfindings than they are to influence more global assessments

For all negative emotion events the profiles were nonparallel3 that is theratings revealed different expectations for men and women The differences areconsistent with the notion that the gender stereotype for emotional expressivenessdoes not assume women to be more expressive for all emotions For examplewomen are not expected to express more disgust and shame in sadness situationsthan are men Also women are expected to react with more contempt than aremen only in disgust guilt and shame situations while for all other situations nodifferences emerge However women are thought to express more sadness fearshame and guilt for all emotion-eliciting situations except for happiness eventsThat is regardless of the emotion theme prevalent in the vignettes women arealways expected to react with more sadness fear shame and guilt

An interesting case regards happiness as a secondary emotion in situationswith a negative core emotion The data reveal that men are typically expected toexperience more happiness in these situations than are women The differencesare strongest for guilt and shame vignettes which involve notions of cheatingand public misbehaviour and might reflect a difference in value structureinherent in the gender stereotype

In sum the results of Study 1 expand our knowledge regarding genderdifferences in emotion stereotypes by considering secondary emotionalresponses as well as modal emotional responses Specifically women are notonly expected to react with more sadness fear shame and guilt in situations forwhich these emotions are central but are expected to do so in all situationsinvolving negative affect Men on the other hand are expected to react withmore anger in a wide variety of situations involving negative affect as well aswith more happiness in some situations involving negative affect This suggeststhat the prevalent emotion stereotype describes womenrsquos predominant emotionalreactions to be more withdrawing (fear and sadness) and self-directed (shameand guilt) whereas menrsquos emotional reactions are seen as more active andaggressive

But to what degree are these general stereotypesexpectations reflected inthe self-perceptions that people have of their own emotional reactions AsJussim et alrsquos (1991) findings show self-perceptions can diverge from thecultural stereotypes Yet Jussim et al also suggest that over time these

3An exception are the shame profiles for the rural sample

622 HESS ET AL

stereotypical beliefs may act as a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy and moveself-perceptions in the direction of being consistent with the stereotype Alsoit is possible that widely held cultural beliefs become prescriptive and thuslead individuals to describe their own behaviour as being in accordance withthe stereotype Gallois (1994) in a review of emotion communication ininterpersonal situations concludes that emotion communication in suchsituations is highly rule-governed A similar perspective underlies Averillrsquos(1997) argument regarding the notion of emotion roles that have entrancerequirements such that for example a successful display of anger presupposessufficient power to adequately address the anger eliciting issue AlsoStoppard and Gruchy (1993) found that individuals anticipate costs andrewards for showing certain emotions in certain contexts Specifically womenexpect more costs when not expressing positive emotions in an lsquolsquootherrsquorsquo-oriented context whereas men expect rewards for showing positive emotionsregardless of context

Taken together these findings from diverse domains suggest that self-perceptions of emotional reactions should show a clear overlap withstereotypical expectations within any particular culture To the degree that weassume that these influences are due to recollection biases we may furtherspeculate that the overlap is less pronounced when asking about behaviouralreactions in particular social contexts than when asking for reactions inlsquolsquogeneralrsquorsquo or independent of a specific social situation Specifically as data onactual behaviour suggest relatively few sex differences in emotional behaviourwhereas the stereotype suggests a wide range of such differences differences inself-perceptions are more likely to be due to the influence of the culturalstereotypes than to actual behavioural differences between the genders Study 2is focused on an analysis of this possibility

STUDY 2

Study 1 confirmed that at least in the Quebec culture there are widely sharedbeliefs concerning how men and women differ in their emotion-relevantexpressive behaviour The central issue to be addressed in Study 2 therefore isthe degree of parallelism that exists between perceptions of how typical malesand females are perceived to respond to emotional events (Study 1) and self-perceptions of onersquos own emotional expressivity

To answer this question men and women drawn from the same population asin Study 1 were asked to indicate for each of the seven types of emotionsituations employed in Study 1 to what degree they expected to react themselveswith each of nine emotions if this event should happen to them In addition weasked participants to indicate the likelihood that they would show each of ninetypes of behaviours corresponding to the nine emotions of the emotion profileThese measures were embedded in a larger questionnaire that assessed beliefs

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 623

regarding emotional reactions of other social groups4 This placement made surethat the cultural beliefs and stereotypes held by the participants regardingemotional expressivity in general were evoked However the specific issue ofsex differences was not alluded to

Method

Participants A total of 360 students attending junior colleges in theMontreal urban region participated in the study Of these only thoseparticipants whose first language learned and still spoken was French whowere born in the province of Quebec (Canada) who had not lived outside ofQuebec for more than five consecutive years and who identified themselvesas either Canadian or Quebecois and not as a member of any other groupwere retained5 The resulting sample consisted of 289 individuals In total163 women and 126 men with a mean age of 1886 years participated ingroups of between 15 and 40 participants Of these 63 men and 85 womencompleted the emotion profiles and 63 men and 78 women completed thebehavioural reactions scale

Procedure Participants were informed of their right to discontinueparticipation at any time and for any reason The experimenter then distributedthe questionnaires The instructions as well as an example were provided on thefirst page The same instructions as employed in Study 1 were used the onlydifference being that participants were told to think about how they would reactand to indicate the likelihood in percent that they themselves would react witheach of the emotionsbehaviours indicated The same instructions were given forboth the emotion profile and the behavioural reactions scale with the onlydifference being that for the latter the word lsquolsquoemotionrsquorsquo was replaced withlsquolsquobehaviourrsquorsquo

Materials For each of seven emotions (happiness anger fear sadnessdisgust shame and guilt) two of the four vignettes employed in Study 1 wereretained Each participant responded to only one vignette for each emotion andvignettes were counterbalanced across participants

4 In the present context only data from the part of the questionnaire asking participants about howthey themselves would react in the described situation will be presented

5These selection criteria were included because the participants for Study 2 were recruited fromseveral Montreal junior colleges with an ethnically diverse population Emotion stereotypes are wellknown to differ between cultures (Kirouac amp Hess 1999) and the participants in Study 1 wererecruited from an ethnically homogenous population To ensure comparability between the twosamples it was therefore necessary to exclude participants from groups not present in the firstsample

624 HESS ET AL

Dependent measures

Emotion profiles These were computed in the same manner as in Study 1That is responses were averaged across the vignettes representing each specificemotion theme

Behavioural reactions scale This scale is intended to assess thebehavioural reactions that are expected for someone who is experiencing theemotional state in question To construct the scale a two-step procedure wasemployed

First 68 students of the University of Quebec at Montreal 54 women and 14men with a mean age of 279 years were asked to list for each of nineemotions (happiness serenity anger disgust fear contempt sadness shameand guilt) the behaviours and observable reactions they associate with eachspecific emotion The answers were compiled into frequency lists andsynonyms were grouped together The three most frequently namedbehaviours for each emotion were retained Due to overlap between someemotions this procedure yielded a list of 22 behaviours For the second step atotal of 44 participants 28 women and 16 men with a mean age of 226years were asked to rate for each behaviour and each of the nine emotionsthe likelihood of observing the behaviour in a person experiencing theemotion using a 7-point scale (1 very unlikely 7 very likely) Behavioursthat received a mean rating of 6 or above for only one emotion comprise thefinal scale

These consisted of the following items6 to laughto get excited (happiness)to trembleto freeze (fear) to hitto insultto criticise (anger) to cryto isolateoneself (sadness) to grimaceto vomit (disgust) to stareto look hard at(contempt) to smileto relaxto contemplate (serenity) to withdrawto loweronersquos headto blush (shame) to justify oneselfto apologise (guilt) On theprofile measure participants were asked to indicate the likelihood as apercentage that they would show each of the behaviours in a situation like theone described in the vignettes

Data analyses Each participant responded to one scenario for each of theseven emotions themes and used only one type of scale As in Study 1 thedata were collapsed over scenarios Because we had responses from morewomen than men for both dependent measures the data for the femaleparticipants were weighted to create equal cell sizes Profile analyses acrossthe nine emotional reactionsbehaviours were conducted to assess sexdifferences

6These items were translated from the original French by the authors

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 625

Results and discussion

As noted earlier the goal of Study 2 was to assess to what degree the self-perceptions of the men and women who participated in this study overlap withthe general stereotypes found in Study 1 To accomplish this the emotionprofiles from Study 1 were compared with the self-reported emotional profilesand with the behavioural reaction profiles collected here

Self-described emotion profiles The means and standard deviations for thenine scales of the emotion profiles for male and female participants arepresented in Table 3 A comparison of these means with those of the profilesfrom Study 1 reveals substantial similarities between the emotional reactionsexpected for oneself and those expected for men and women in general

Behavioral reactions Table 3 shows the means and standard deviations forthe nine behavioural reaction profiles These profiles represent the participantsself-report of the likelihood that they would display these specific behaviours inthe situations described by the vignettes As the focus of this paper is on sex

TABLE 3Means and standard deviations for self-perceptions of emotional reactionsbehaviours

for men and women (Study 2)

Men Women

Situation Mean SD Mean SD

AngerHappiness 262 1224 006 054Laughget excited 790 1826 429 1168Serenity 262 827 135 532Smilerelaxcontemplate 865 2068 435 1185Sadness 2359 2390 4405 3151Cryisolate oneself 935 2083 1825 2250Fear 603 1589 486 1070Tremblefreeze 332 814 630 1155Anger 6268 2873 6076 2928Hitinsultcriticise 3540 3042 2654 2873Disgust 1175 2447 1094 1997Grimacevomit 194 553 286 854Contempt 1865 2505 2102 2543Starelook hard at 2065 2718 1156 2216Shame 286 827 802 1887Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 1044 2187 1038 1642Guilt 349 826 491 1582Justify oneselfapologise 2045 3072 1761 2663

(Continued)

626 HESS ET AL

TABLE 3(Continued)

Men Women

Situation Mean SD Mean SD

DisgustHappiness 611 1714 143 575Laughget excited 1989 2669 915 1825Serenity 611 1855 208 1159Smilerelaxcontemplate 1159t 2113 578 1482Sadness 516 1537 490 1531Cryisolate oneself 073 403 346 1352Fear 373t 1066 911 2018Tremblefreeze 476t 1154 1015 1977Anger 1359 2146 1437 2521Hitinsultcriticise 1214 2210 1186 2151Disgust 5086 3257 5881 3178Grimacevomit 1167 2121 1692 2236Contempt 1798 2226 1750 2706Starelook hard at 1991 2362 1686 2363Shame 1023 1972 1683 2738Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 645 1663 1169 2337Guilt 262 937 119 378Justify oneselfapologise 992 2511 744 1924

SadnessHappiness 317 1280 412 1594Laughget excited 123 789 128 114Serenity 887t 2017 318 1456Smilerelaxcontemplate 621 1848 346 1196Sadness 7690 2816 8251 2258Cryisolate oneself 6008 3131 6736 3059Fear 849t 1820 1546 2637Tremblefreeze 1595 2763 1135 2068Anger 1825 2641 2261 2919Hitinsultcriticise 532 1399 641 1517Disgust 651t 2015 176 940Grimacevomit 790 2017 353 1318Contempt 659 2125 332 1121Starelook hard at 000 000 045 397Shame 214 1050 141 711Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 2008 2916 724 1680Guilt 1524 2494 2141 2985Justify oneselfapologise 315 1065 391 1478

FearHappiness 317 1487 006 054Laughget excited 203 1054 058 361Serenity 587 1698 082 327

(Continued overleaf)

627

TABLE 3(Continued)

Men Women

Situation Mean SD Mean SD

Smilerelaxcontemplate 1048 2243 182 666Sadness 2333 3051 2929 3588Cryisolate oneself 1306 2536 3022 3582Fear 5111 3207 7535 2715Tremblefreeze 2008 2565 3378 3378Anger 2468 3297 1954 2949Hitinsultcriticise 1222 2098 446 1410Disgust 787 1808 1006 2206Grimacevomit 429 1270 365 1115Contempt 1192 2216 1141 2078Starelook hard at 677 1822 391 1405Shame 143 470 200 615Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 1606 2579 1000 2117Guilt 794 2199 369 995Justify oneselfapologise 282 1263 276 1319

ShameHappiness 452 1596 144 1039Laughget excited 1825 2905 1387 1990Serenity 444 1492 182 1028Smilerelaxcontemplate 1206t 2333 623 1262Sadness 1151 2121 2077 2361Cryisolate oneself 334 877 426 1107Fear 1246 2431 1135 1700Tremblefreeze 776 1569 894 1491Anger 1262 2259 1432 2408Hitinsultcriticise 565 1478 314 1140Disgust 206 966 347 1244Grimacevomit 202 590 231 1086Contempt 730 1532 811 1880Starelook hard at 347 833 304 1160Shame 4819 3534 5968 2948Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 2563 2974 2885 2908Guilt 3095 3442 4788 3282Justify oneselfapologise 4379 3144 4256 3074

GuiltHappiness 1024 2432 355 1189Laughget excited 734 2259 584 1761Serenity 262 1008 223 771Smilerelaxcontemplate 645 1692 416 1409Sadness 2003t 2705 2971 3390Cryisolate oneself 960 1992 2273 2979Fear 1778 2667 2653 3305

(Continued)

628

differences we will not discuss these data in detail However two things arenoteworthy First both men and women report lower probabilities that theywould react with a certain behaviour for example lsquolsquoto laughto get excitedrsquorsquothan with the emotion that corresponds to the behaviour (happiness) Thisfinding is not unexpected as individuals do not always express their emotionsoutwardly or may have developed idiosyncratic means of expressing certainemotions Second the profile data for the behaviours resemble strongly theemotional reactions reported For example for anger the highest means arefound for to hitto insultto criticise for to cryto isolate one self and for to stare

TABLE 3(Continued)

Men Women

Situation Mean SD Mean SD

Tremblefreeze 1206 2212 1227 2024Anger 1762 2980 1926 2950Hitinsultcriticise 129 543 221 720Disgust 1248 2569 1152 2402Grimacevomit 581 1642 351 1385Contempt 1603 2857 1464 2611Starelook hard at 129 495 136 485Shame 2667 3227 5375 3467Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 1952 2472 1769 2333Guilt 5071 3885 5753 3372Justify oneselfapologise 4484 3581 4286 3608

HappinessHappiness 8913 1981 9106 1471Laughget excited 5763 3420 6069 3283Serenity 2738t 3650 3906 3797Smilerelaxcontemplate 5451 3445 4647 3432Sadness 127 946 020 123Cryisolate oneself 040 318 029 141Fear 103 372 206 680Tremblefreeze 419t 1313 090 057Anger 032 252 000 000Hitinsultcriticise 000 000 013 114Disgust 048 378 000 000Grimacevomit 000 000 000 000Contempt 081 522 000 000Starelook hard at 355 1392 147 388Shame 111 764 000 000Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 718 1905 687 1859Guilt 270 1526 000 000Justify oneselfapologise 355 1535 090 340

Note Significant differences between men and women tp lt 1 p lt 05 p lt 01 p lt 001

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 629

to look hard at which correspond to anger sadness and contempt reactionsrespectively

However a number of differences between these two types of profiles canalso be observed For example for the emotional reaction profiles for anger andsadness the second highest mean is found for guilt whereas for the behaviouralreaction profiles for these emotions the second highest mean is found for shamebehaviours (to withdrawto lower onersquos headto blush) This findings may be dueto the general confusion between shame and guilt that has been observed forWestern cultures (see eg Wallbott amp Scherer 1994)

Sex differences To assess whether male and female participants differedwith regard to their expected emotional reactions and behaviours in the differentemotion eliciting situations profile analyses were conducted on the ratings foreach emotion situation All analyses and post-hoc tests were conducted at analpha level of 05 The results are shown in Table 4

TABLE 4Results of profile analyses on self-reported likelihood

of emotional reactionsbehaviours for men andwomen (Study 2)

Vignettes F df p

AngerReactions 295 8116 005Behaviours 183 8113 079

DisgustReactions 169 8115 107Behaviours 173 8116 099

FearReactions 330 8116 002Behaviours 390 8116 001

SadnessReactions 207 8116 044Behaviours 170 8115 105

GuiltReactions 186 8117 071Behaviours 130 8115 251

ShameReactions 215 8116 037Behaviours 70 8116 689

HappinessReactions 106 8116 397Behaviours 109 8116 376

630 HESS ET AL

Emotional reactions For all emotion situations except disgust andhappiness the emotional reactions profiles were nonparallel or marginallynonparallel (see Table 4) For the nonparallel profiles post-hoc tests revealedthat a similar pattern of sex differences emerged across the different emotionthemes For happiness and serenity there were either no significant differencesbetween men and women or men reported experiencing these emotions with ahigher probability than did women Conversely for sadness fear shame andguilt there were either no significant sex differences or women reported feelingthese emotions with a higher probability than did men For anger disgust andcontempt reactions no significant differences emerged

Emotional behaviour profiles Only the fear profile was significantlynonparallel (different) for men and women The profiles for anger and disgustwere marginally nonparallel and the remaining profiles were all parallel andcoincident Thus fewer significant differences between menrsquos and womenrsquosexpected behaviours in the situations described by the vignettes were found thanwas the case for the expected emotional reactions in Studies 1 and 2 Yet it isimportant to note that the probabilities reported for the behavioural profiles werelower overall and it is thus possible that this lack of differences is due to a lackof sensitivity of the measure

As postulated based on previous research (eg Crawford Clippax OnyxGault amp Benton 1992) as well as on the emotional reactions profile womenreport a higher probability of either crying or isolating oneself in an angersituation than do men Conversely and in accordance with both the literature onanger expression (see earlier) and the results from the emotional reactionsprofile men report it more likely to hitto insultto criticise than women thoughthis difference is not significant In addition they report that they aresignificantly more likely to stareto look hard (contempt) than do women abehaviour that could also be interpreted as aggressive when shown in responseto an insult

As regards the disgust situations men report that they are more likely tolaughto get excited This sex difference matches the finding for the emotionalreactions profile but was not found in Study 1 Finally for the fear situation menreport that they are more likely to hitto insultto criticise as well as to smiletorelaxto contemplate (serenity) than do women The emotional reactions profilefor fear from this study shows that men report a higher probability of reactingwith serenity but not with anger than do women As these behaviourscorrespond to a macho or cool demeanour in a threatening situation they fit thegeneral stereotype of masculine behaviour Conversely women report to bemore likely to trembleto freeze as well as to cryto isolate one self in fearsituations

In sum although many fewer sex differences reached significance whencomparing self-reported expected behaviours for men and women the pattern of

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 631

results is largely congruent with previous findings Specifically women reporteda higher probability of showing behaviours congruent with sadness and fear thandid men whereas men reported higher probabilities for anger and serenebehaviours In addition men reported a higher probability of showing acontempt behaviour in an anger situation yet the relevant behaviour (to staretolook hard) could be interpreted as aggressive in that context

How congruent are the findings fromStudies 1 and 2

As mentioned earlier not all significant differences found in Study 1 for theexpected reactions for men and women in general were also found for self-reports of expected reactions by men and women for themselves Yet as theresults for the two studies are based on different degrees of freedomsignificance levels cannot be directly compared To assess whether stereotypicaland self-reported sex differences were of similar magnitude we computed theeffect sizes for both studies Table 5 shows Cohenrsquos d for the post-hoc

TABLE 5Cohenrsquos d for sex differences in Studies 1 and 2

Study 1 Study 2

SituationEmotionalreactions

Emotionalreactions

Emotionalbehaviours

AngerHappiness 7023Serenity 7025Sadness 203 073 041Fear 123 030Anger 7055 7030Disgust 068Contempt 7026Shame 117 7035Guilt 129

DisgustHappiness 7032 7037 7047Serenity 7045 7026 7021Sadness 095 027Fear 189 033 033AngerDisgust 160 024 024Contempt 050Shame 062 7028 026Guilt 062 020

(Continued)

632 HESS ET AL

TABLE 5(Continued)

Study 1 Study 2

SituationEmotionalreactions

Emotionalreactions

Emotionalbehaviours

SadnessHappiness 7053Serenity 7032Sadness 184 022 024Fear 171 031Anger 7065 042Disgust 7030 7025Contempt 021Shame 020 7046 054Guilt 176 022 7033

FearHappiness 7021 7030Serenity 7026 7041 7052Sadness 189 055Fear 221 082 046Anger 7084 7043Disgust 067ContemptShame 049 7026Guilt 172 7025

ShameHappiness 7045 7023Serenity 7027 7020 7031Sadness 175 041Fear 128Anger 7069Disgust 065Contempt 054Shame 154 035Guilt 153 050

GuiltHappiness 7107 7035Serenity 7051Sadness 198 032 051Fear 162 029AngerDisgust 128Contempt 075Shame 178 051Guilt 183 020

633

comparisons for each emotion in the profile for the six negative emotionsituations across the two studies For Study 1 the effect sizes for the urban andthe rural sample were combined To facilitate the reading of the table onlydifferences for which d was at least 020 (ie equivalent to a small effect) areshown In general effect sizes for Study 1 are larger than those for Study 2 Foremotional reactions the expected differences between men and women were ofmedium (gt 050) to large (gt 080) size whereas for self-perceptions the expecteddifferences between men and women were small to medium in size

The most stable sex difference across the two studies was found for sadnessboth as a core emotion in sadness vignettes and as a secondary emotion That isfor all negative emotions the general stereotype describes women as reactingwith more sadness and women also perceive themselves as reacting with moresadness andor report more sadness behaviours Further women are expected toreact with (and they self-report) more shame and guilt reactionsbehaviours inshame and guilt situations However for the other negative emotions (angerdisgust sadness and fear) men report higher levels of shame reactions or shamebehaviours (but not both) Finally fear reactions and behaviours are described asmore likely for women in general and women perceive themselves as reactingwith more fear in disgust sadness fear and guilt situations

Another very stable sex difference across studies regards happiness andserenity reactions for negative emotion vignettes Men consistently are bothexpected to react with and self-report more happiness reactions as well ashappiness behaviours for disgust fear and shame vignettes To a lesser degreethis pattern also emerges for sadness and guilt vignettes As mentioned in thediscussion of Study 1 this may reflect differences in the value structure betweenmen and women

In sum a comparison of effect sizes shows considerable consistency acrossthe two studies Specifically noteworthy is the very consistent finding for boththe stereotypical beliefs and the self-reports with regard to sadness reactionswhich are considered as more likely for women than for men for all negativeemotion situations studied

However a number of differences between the general stereotypes and theself-perceptions also emerged specifically with regard to shame reactionsWhereas women are generally believed to be more likely to react with shameto negative emotion events the self-reported likelihood for shame as aconcomitant emotion is higher for men for all situations except for guilt(given the general confusion regarding these states observed in Westerncultures this may be due to shame being a core rather than a concomitantemotion for guilt scenarios) Yet self-reported shame behaviours are morelikely for women than for men in sadness and disgust situations A possibleexplanation is that men are actively trying to not show shame reactionsmdashtoconform to the general stereotypemdashbut are aware that they nonetheless arelikely to feel shame in those situations

634 HESS ET AL

To conclude the general stereotype and self-perceptions of emotionalreactions and behaviours suggest that women react with more sadness to all typesof negative emotion events Further the stereotypes and the self-perceptions arein agreement on menrsquos greater likelihood to react with happiness and serenity to avariety of negative emotions In contrast differences between the generalstereotypes and self-perceptions emerge for shame reactions with men reportingin situations when shame is a secondary emotion a higher likelihood of shamereactions but not necessarily shame behaviours than do women

STUDY 3

The results from Study 2 suggest that the stereotypical beliefs regarding menrsquosand womenrsquos emotional reactions and behaviours in a variety of emotion-inducing situations converge with self-perceptions of menrsquos and womenrsquosemotional reactions and behaviours in those same situations This finding isconsistent with the notion that autobiographic statements that requireparticipants to summarise over a number of related experiences may be biasedby stereotypical expectations (see eg Feldman-Barrett et al 1998) This leadsto the question of whether a similar overlap can also be found for narratives ofsingle specific emotional events from the participantsrsquo past If stereotypesindeed influence the way emotional events are reconstructed in a narrative wewould expect to find that women report more sadness events and express moresadness overall as well as more intense target emotions for all but anger eventsConversely we would expect men to report more situations involving anger aswell as experiencing more happiness and serenity overall

However as Study 3 is based on personal narratives and not on standardisedvignettes such a finding could simply be due to the fact that the emotionantecedent events in a real-life setting differ for men and women To assess thispossibility we decided to measure the emotion antecedent events by means of anappraisal questionnaire that assesses the participantsrsquo perception of the emotionantecedent situation To the degree that perceptions of emotion antecedents aresimilar for men and women while reported emotional reactions differ we canconclude that observed sex differences are not due to differences in theperception of the event per se For example if womenrsquos tendency to report moresadness were due to a difference in the perception of the emotion antecedentsituation we would expect women to report more often that they did not feel thatthey could do anything to change the situation or that they had to adapt to thesituation (as sadness is generally associated with the notion of irrevocable loss)

Overview

For this study we translated and adapted a questionnaire reported by Scherer(1988) that consists of two parts The first part invites the participants todescribe an event during which they experienced an emotion The second part

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 635

asks specific questions regarding the appraisal process We added a section inwhich we asked participants to complete an emotion profile for the event Toavoid the possibility that men and women would relate narratives from widelydifferent types of situations we asked participants to describe an event related tofamily interactions This class of situations should be readily accessible to allparticipants and ensure that emotional events involving human interactionpartners were reported

Allowing participants to choose the type of emotional events they report hasseveral advantages Most importantly we can assess what type of emotionalevents men and women choose to report spontaneously It also permitsparticipants to choose a salient event for which they can recollect theinformation necessary to respond to the appraisal questions On the other handthis approach is unlikely to result in a well-balanced distribution of emotiontopics thus making it difficult or impossible to analyse the data separately fordifferent emotion themes Yet in the context of the present study we were onlyinterested in sex differences in reports and not in absolute levels of responsesStudies 1 and 2 suggest that sex differences are very stable across all negativeemotions We therefore decided to allow participants to choose the emotiontheme and analysed the data collapsed across all negative emotion themes

Method

Participants A total of 171 students 87 men and 84 women with a meanage of 1862 years participated in this study Most of the participants (147) wererecruited from an ethnically homogenous junior college in the larger Montrealurban area (Cegep Lionel-Groulx Ste-Therese Quebec Canada) and partici-pated in groups An additional 24 participants were recruited individually

Procedure The experimenter explained that the study concerned emotionalevents in peoplersquos lives Participants were informed of their right to discontinueparticipation at any time and for any reason The experimenter then distributedthe questionnaires and responded to questions regarding the procedure The tasktook between 10 and 30 minutes Most of this time difference can be attributedto the amount of detail provided in the event description that ranged from acouple of words (eg birth of my daughter) to well over a page

Dependent measures The questionnaire consisted of four parts The firstpart was an open-ended question asking the participants to describe any eventinvolving their family life that led them to experience an emotion Sadnessshame anger guilt joy fear and disgust were provided as examples ofemotions Participants were asked to give a detailed description of the situationincluding the events that led up to it their reactions and those of others presentIn addition they were asked to identify the people involved with respect to their

636 HESS ET AL

relationship with them (eg my partner my sister etc) as well as to identify themain emotion theme of the story This served to ensure that the participantsbased their answers to the following questions on a specific event and not on aclass of similar events

Emotion description The second part of the questionnaire consisted ofquestions regarding when the event happened for how long they felt theemotion and the intensity of the core emotion identified as the emotion theme ofthe story Participants were also asked to indicate whether they tried to hide orcontrol their feelings and to what degree This part also contained the emotionprofile used in Studies 1 and 2 Using this measure participants were asked toindicate to what percentage they had felt each of the nine emotions from theprofile

Appraisal questionnaire A series of questions regarding the appraisal processwere used to assess the emotion antecedent events These questions weretranslated from the questionnaire reported by Scherer (1988) Specificallyparticipants were asked to what degree they had expected the situation to occurhow pleasant or unpleasant they considered the event whether the event helpedor hindered them in achieving their aims to what degree they considered that thesituation or the event that caused the emotion was unjust or unfair whether theevent was caused by their own or by someone elsersquos behaviour to what degreethey considered that the behaviour that caused the event would be judged asimproper or immoral by their acquaintances how the event affected theirfeelings about themselves such as their self-esteem or self-confidence andfinally to what degree the event changed their relationships with the peopleinvolved (all on negative-positive 7-point bipolar scales)

In addition participants were given a list of 11 specific potential causes of theevent (caused it myself natural causes act of god etc) They also evaluatedtheir ability to act upon or to cope with the event and its consequences using ascale involving 5 options The last part of the questionnaire consisted ofquestions regarding the participantsrsquo sex their age and whether they werecurrently seeing someone in a love-based relationship and if so for how long

Results

Of the 171 reported emotion events 147 (74 reported by men and 73 reported bywomen) concerned negative emotional events Of these a total of 62 weresadness events 22 were anger events and 11 were guilt events The remainingevents were distributed over a large number of negative emotions

As expected the very low frequency of reports for specific emotion themesmade separate analyses of reports of these events unfeasible We thereforedecided to perform analyses on the data summed over all negative emotionthemes The 24 events with positive emotion themes were obviously excludedfrom these analyses

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 637

Do women report more sadness events and men more anger events Toaddress this question a chi-square test was performed on the frequency withwhich men and women labeled the reported event as a sad versus an anger eventIn line with the results of Studies 1 and 2 we found men to report more angerevents and women to report more sadness events Specifically 14 men and 8women reported anger events and 25 men and 37 women reported sad events w2

= 355 p = 06 d = 42Do women report more intense core emotions than men For the intensity of

the core emotion experienced during the event women reported significantlyhigher levels (M = 593 SD = 101) than men (M = 554 SD = 123) t(145) =222 p = 028 d = 37

Do women and men report different levels of negative emotions across theemotion profile Figure 2 presents the emotion profiles separately for men andwomen An inspection of the profiles shows that overall men report morehappinessserenity whereas women report higher levels of all other emotionsThe profiles are nonparallel F(8 137) = 5877 p lt 001 Post-hoc analysesrevealed a significant sex difference in self-reported sadness with womenreporting higher levels than men To compare the sex differences in the profiles

Figure 2 Emotion profile for menrsquos and womenrsquos self-reported emotional reactions to negativeemotion events (Study 3)

638 HESS ET AL

found in this study with those from Studies 1 and 2 effect sizes were calculatedUsing the same cut-off point as previously (small effect size d = 020) only twodifferences were found to be stable across the three studies Men report higherlevels of happiness for negative emotion events (d = 7022) and women reporthigher levels of sadness (d = 043) As the latter difference may be due to thehigher frequency of reported sadness events by women we also verified whetherwomen report higher levels of sadness when sadness events are excluded fromthe analysis An inspection of the means revealed a marginally significantdifference in the same direction M = 6472 SD = 3247 and M = 5108 SD =3684 for women and men respectively t(83) = 181 p = 074 d = 40

Are there differences in appraisal patterns between men and women Asmentioned earlier the reported differences in emotional reactions could be dueto differences in the perception of the emotion antecedent events Yet nodifferences in appraisal patterns were found suggesting that emotion antecedentevents were perceived similarly In addition despite the more frequent and moreintense reports of sadness women did not report different coping styles thanmen and did not seem to feel more helpless (38 men vs 34 women report thisreaction) In fact women more frequently report that they felt able to lsquolsquoinfluencethe situation positivelyrsquorsquo (19 women vs 9 men report this reaction though thedifference is not significant)

Discussion

Study 3 extended the study of emotion stereotypes and self-perceptions based onvignettes to narratives of emotional events that the participants had in factexperienced themselves The goal of the study was to investigate whether thefindings from Studies 1 and 2 generalise to such recollections of personal eventsThe results strongly suggest this to be the case Women again report higherlevels of sadness for negative emotion events They also report more sad eventsin general Men on the other hand report more anger events as well as morehappiness for negative emotion events as was found in both Studies 1 and 2 Yetno reported differences in appraisal or coping emerged This suggests that theobserved differences in emotional reactions are not due to a bias in the appraisalprocess nor to an inability to act upon the event

If emotion antecedents do not differ why are differences in emotionalreactions reported We suggest that such differences represent an influence ofthe general emotion stereotype on the narrative reconstruction of a personalevent This conclusion is based on the observation of a null effect and thus opento the critique that the present study lacked the power necessary to detect realdifferences in appraisal between men and women To assess this critique wecalculated the absolute mean effect size for the interval-scaled appraisalquestions to be d = 015 To achieve 80 power a sample of 1100 participantswould be needed These data underscore the very slim differences in appraisals

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 639

between men and women making it highly unlikely that the effects observed inthis study are mediated by a difference in appraisal and thus by a difference inthe perception of the underlying event

CONCLUSIONS

The present series of studies had the goal to assess general emotion stereotypesand their influence on self-perceptions of emotional reactions by men andwomen We wanted to both describe these stereotypes in more detail with regardnot only to the modal emotion for a specific event (such as sadness reactions to aloss) but also with regard to the secondary emotions present in these situationsFurther we wanted to assess to what degree such expectations for men andwomen in general are endorsed by individuals for themselves as well as whetherthey would be spontaneously reported when relating a personally experiencedevent

Two gender differences were found to be stable across all three experimentalparadigms Women are expected to be more likely to react with sadness in allnegative emotion situations they expect themselves to be more likely to reactwith sadness as well as to cry and to withdraw more and finally women reportmore sadness in personal events In contrast men are expected to react withmore happinessserenity during negative emotional situations they expectthemselves to react more frequently this way as well as to laugh and smile moreand to be more relaxed They also tend to report more happiness whendescribing negative personal events

Not all general emotion stereotypes were found in the self-perceptionsstudied in Studies 2 and 3 Specifically according to Study 1 women areexpected to be more likely to react with shame and guilt in all negative emotionsituations Yet women did not expect to do so for themselves in situations otherthan shame and guilt situations and in fact men reported to be more likely toreact with shame in a variety of situations Further men and women did notreport any differences with regard to experiences of shame and guilt during thepersonal events

Study 3 included an appraisal questionnaire to address the question whetherthe self-reported differences in emotionality between men and women are due todifferences in the appraisal of the emotion antecedent events or rather to theinfluence of the prevalent norms No differences in appraisals were detectedsuggesting that the self-reported differences may be due to the normative forcesof the general stereotype rather than to appraisal differences

It may be argued that the Study 3 is based on recollections of past events andthat self-reports of emotional experiences represent after the fact reconstructionsthat differ from the actually experienced emotions during the event (seeParkinson amp Manstead 1993) A related argument may be made for Study 2where participants had to estimate the likelihood of their emotional reactions to

640 HESS ET AL

hypothetical events (even though the latter were chosen to be common everydayevents) This may well be true Yet the question remains why did men andwomen reconstruct the events differently in terms of their emotional reactionsThe answer would then be that the prevalent emotion stereotype which islargely endorsed by the population studied influenced this reconstruction Yetas peoplesrsquo sense of self depends on their past histories this would imply thatreconstructions of emotional events in line with emotion stereotypes mayeventually lead individuals to conform more closely to these stereotypes as theybecome more and more part of their emotional history and eventually of theiremotional self

Manuscript received 30 May 1997Revised manuscript received 23 February 2000

REFERENCES

Adams S Kuebli J Boyle PA amp Fivush R (1995) Gender differences in parent-childconversations about past emotions A longitudinal investigation Sex Roles 33 309ndash323

Allen JG amp Haccoun DM (1976) Sex differences in emotionality A multidimensional approachHuman Relations 29 711ndash722

Averill JR (1997) The emotions An integrative approach In R Hogan JA Johnson amp SRBriggs (Eds) Handbook of personality psychology (pp 513ndash541) San Diego CA AcademicPress

Birnbaum DW (1983) Preschoolersrsquo stereotypes about sex differences in emotionality Areaffirmation Journal of Genetic Psychology 143 139ndash140

Briton NJ amp Hall JA (1995) Gender-based expectancies and observer judgements of smilingJournal of Nonverbal Behavior 19 49ndash65

Brody LR amp Hall JA (1993) Gender and emotion In M Lewis amp JM Haviland (Eds)Handbook of emotions (pp 447-460) New York Guilford Press

Crawford J Clippax S Onyx J Gault U amp Benton P (1992) Emotion and genderConstructing meaning from memory London Sage

Dunn J Bretherton I amp Munn P (1987) Conversations about feeling states between mothers andtheir children Developmental Psychology 23 132ndash139

Eagly AH amp Mladinic A (1989) Gender stereotypes and attitudes toward women and menPersonality and Social Psychology Bulletin 15 543ndash558

Ekman P amp Friesen W (1986) A new pan-cultural facial expression of emotion Motivation andEmotion 10 159ndash168

Feldman-Barrett L Robin L Pietromonaco PR amp Eysell KM (1998) Are women the moreemotional sex Evidence from emotional experiences in social context Cognition and Emotion12 555ndash578

Fernandez-Dols J-M amp Ruiz-Belda M-A (1995) Are smiles a sign of happiness Gold medalwinners at the Olympic Games Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 69 1113ndash1119

Fischer A (1993) Sex differences in emotionality Fact or stereotype Feminism and Psychology 3303ndash318

Fivush R (1989) Exploring differences in the emotional content of mother child conversationsabout the past Sex Roles 20 675ndash691

Frank MG amp Ekman P (1993) Not all smiles are created equal The differences betweenenjoyment and nonenjoymen t smiles [Special Issue Current issues in psychological humorresearch] Humor International Journal of Humor Research 6 9ndash26

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 641

Gallois C (1994) Group membership social rules and power A social psychologica l perspectiveon emotional communication Journal of Pragmatics 22 301ndash324

Hall JA (1984) Nonverbal sex differences Communication accuracy and expressive styleBaltimore MD Johns Hopkins University Press

Izard C (1972) Patterns of emotions A new analysis of anxiety and depression New YorkAcademic Press

Jussim L Milbourn M amp Nelson W (1991) Emotional openness Sex-role stereotypes and self-perceptions Representative Research in Social Psychology 19 35ndash52

Kirouac G amp Hess U (1999) Group membership and the decoding of nonverbal behavior In PPhilippot R Feldman amp E Coats (Eds) The social context of nonverbal behavior (pp 182ndash210) New York Cambridge University Press

Kring AM amp Gordon AH (1998) Sex differences in emotion Expression experience andphysiology Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74 686ndash703

LaFrance M amp Banaji M (1992) Toward a reconsideration of the gender-emotion relationship InMS Clark (Ed) Emotion and social behavior Review of personality and social psychology(Vol 14 pp 178ndash201) Newbury Park CA Sage

LaFrance M amp Hecht MA (1995) Why smiles generate leniency Personality and SocialPsychology Bulletin 21 207ndash214

Lazarus RS (1991) Emotion and adaptation Oxford UK Oxford University PressParkinson B amp Manstead ASR (1993) Making sense of emotion in stories and social life

Cognition and Emotion 7 295ndash323Plutchik R (1980) Emotion A psychoevolutionar y synthesis New York Harper amp RowRime B Mesquita B Philippot P amp Boca S (1991) Beyond the emotional event Six studies on

the social sharing of emotion Cognition and Emotion 5 435ndash465Scherer KR (1988) Appendix C Questionnaire used in the International Survey on Emotion

Antecedents and Reactions (ISEAR) In KR Scherer (Ed) Facets of emotion Recent researchHillsdale NJ Erlbaum

Sherman JW amp Bessenhoff GR (1999) Stereotypes as source monitoring cues On theinteraction between episodic and semantic memory Psychological Science 10 106ndash110

Stoppard JM amp Gruchy CD (1993) Gender context and expression of positive emotionPersonality and Social Psychology Bulletin 19 143ndash150

Tucker JS amp Riggio RE (1988) The role of social skills in encoding posed and spontaneousfacial expressions Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 12 87ndash97

Wallbott HG amp Scherer KR (1994) Cultural determinants in experiencing shame and guilt InJune Price Tangney amp Kurt W Fischer (Eds) Self conscious emotions The psychology of shameand guilt embarrasment and pride (pp 465ndash487) New York Guilford Press

642 HESS ET AL

both mothers and fathers use more varied emotion terms and more of themwhen talking to daughters than when talking to sons Further some emotionssuch as sadness are mentioned more often to daughters than to sons (AdamsKuebli Boyle amp Fivush 1995 Dunn Bretherton amp Munn 1987 Fivush1989) These socialisation practices are obviously consistent with a belief on thepart of parents that females should be more interested in emotion as well asexpressive of it than should males To the extent that this belief of greateremotional expressivity in females reflects actual behavioural differences acrossthe genders we would obviously be hesitant to label it a stereotype though astereotypical belief could ultimately be the source of the differences Whereasthose studies that have examined observed expressivity in minimal socialsituations (noninteractive) found that females tend to be somewhat moreexpressive than are males (see eg Fischer 1993) studies that have examinedactual male versus female expressivity in a larger context paint a relatively morecomplex picture (see eg Kring amp Gordon 1998)

Yet although the general gender stereotype and global self-descriptionssuggest a large difference in expressivity between men and women observeddifferences and self-reports of specific events yield little or no gender effectsFor example Feldman-Barrett et al (1998) found sex-related differences forglobal self-descriptions of emotions but not for ratings obtained in a diary studywhere participants rated their emotions following social interactions In a similarvein Jussim Milbourn and Nelson (1991) who used telephone interviews toassess self-perceptions of emotional expressivity as well as perceptions ofemotional expressivity in men and women in general found that although bothmen and women believed that women are more emotionally expressive thanmen there were little or no differences in self-perceptions This effect wasstronger for older participants than for younger participants Jussim et al (1991)interpret this finding as support for a self-fulfilling prophecy effect ofstereotypes on actual behaviour

An exception regards smiling behaviour that is both believed and observed tobe more typical for women and aggressive anger reactions which are found to bemore typical for men (see Briton amp Hall 1995 Brody amp Hall 1993 Fischer1993) However despite these exceptions evidence is accumulating thatobserved emotional expressivity depends on the details of the social situation aswell as on personality factors as has been underlined in previous research(Feldman-Barrett et al 1998 Fischer 1993 Hall 1984 LaFrance amp Banaji1992 Tucker amp Riggio 1988)

Thus when studying stereotypes and self-perceptions of emotionalexpressivity we need to distinguish three different levels First beliefs regardingthe emotional behaviour of men and women in general Second self-descriptions by men and women of emotional reactions to certain types ofspecific emotion-inducing events (eg learning that a supposed friend isspreading unpleasant rumours) and finally menrsquos and womenrsquos autobiographic

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 611

narratives of a specific emotion event All three types of reports should reflectthe influence of cultural beliefs regarding emotional expressivity but to differentdegrees The level of similarity between these different reports should help usbetter understand the prevalence and influence of these beliefs for situations inwhich people report emotions Further as Jussim et al (1991) suggestdescribing onersquos emotional experiences in terms of culturally shared beliefsabout the nature of these experiences may in the long run lead to changes in theway events are experienced

``Purersquorsquo emotions vs emotion profiles

The body of research on gender stereotypes for emotions briefly reviewedearlier is based primarily on studies that focus either on lsquolsquopurersquorsquo emotionalstates such as in studies on the self-reported frequency of experience of certainemotions on beliefs regarding the frequency with which these emotions areexperienced or on certain behavioural modes for such pure states as in studieson crying when angry

Yet lsquolsquopurersquorsquo emotional states are rare and most emotional situations elicitmore than one emotion with some being more prominent than others (Izard1972 Plutchik 1980) An interesting implication of this is that genderstereotypes regarding differences in emotional expressiveness may not onlyinvolve differences in the expression of a principal emotion (eg sadness inresponse to an irrevocable loss) but also differences regarding the presence ofsecondary emotions such as anger or guilt The presence or absence of thesesecondary emotions in a particular context is likely to have importantimplications for how individuals cope with a given event For example anassertive expression of lsquolsquoself-righteousrsquorsquo anger may not be possible whenfeelings of guilt or shame occur at the same time This suggests that a study onemotional stereotypes should focus not only on lsquolsquocorersquorsquo emotions but shouldinclude an analysis of the secondary emotions that are expected to be elicited inmen and women as well

Overview

Three studies were conducted The first assessed emotional reactions of men andwomen to various emotion-eliciting events Specifically respondents wereasked to indicate the percentage of women and men who would react with eachof nine emotions to a series of short vignettes Study 2 assessed the level towhich participantsrsquo self-perceptions of their emotional reactions paralleled thegeneral stereotypes found in Study 1 For this a subset of the vignettes used inStudy 1 were employed The participantsrsquo task was to indicate for each event thelikelihood as a percentage that they personally would react with each of thenine emotions from the emotion profile when they were confronted with thesituations described in the vignettes Finally in Study 3 participants were asked

612 HESS ET AL

to describe an event that had happened to them in the past and to indicate theemotions they had felt during the event

STUDY 1

The goal of Study 1 was to assess the beliefs held by young adults regarding theemotions likely to be expressed by men and women in specific emotion elicitingsituations Unlike previous research we were interested in assessing thesebeliefs on a lsquolsquoprofilersquorsquo measure of expressivity That is we wanted to discovernot just what individuals perceived to be the modal emotion expressed by malesand females in any given situation but also their views regarding the probabilitythat any of several other basic emotions would be expressed in that situationConsistent with previous research we expected that women would be perceivedto be more expressive of all emotions than would men with the exception ofanger Further we anticipated that the profile measure would reveal consistentgender differences in the secondary or nonmodal emotional responsesassociated with particular eliciting events

Method

Materials The emotion scenarios were taken from a large database of self-reported emotion eliciting events (ISEAR International Survey on EmotionAntecedents and Reactions)1 This database contains self-descriptions ofemotion related events from 2921 participants from 37 countries For each ofseven basic emotions events that were frequently reported as involving thisemotion were selected from the database These descriptions were translatedinto French and any reference to the gender of the protagonist was replaced witha gender neutral noun or preposition

Four men and four women then estimated on 7-point scales to whatextent each event represented each of seven core relational themes Corerelational themes (Lazarus 1991) refer to the common content of eventslikely to elicit a certain emotion (eg for sadness the core relational themeinvolves an irrevocable loss) A 7-point scale regarding the social versusindividual character of each vignette was also completed by the participantsin this pre-test Using these data four vignettes for which the target emotionaltheme was identified and which were perceived as describing social situations

1The data are part of an international project ISEAR (International Survey on EmotionAntecedent s and Reactions) initiated by Klaus Scherer University of Geneva The developmen t ofthe databank has been supported by the Maison des Sciences de lrsquoHomme (Paris France) theThyssen Foundation (Germany) and the Societe Academique de lrsquoUniversite de Geneve(Switzerland) The data bank consortium consists of Agneta Fischer (University of Amsterdam)Pierre Philippot (University of Louvain at Louvain-la-Neuve) and Harald Wallbott (University ofSalzburg) Readers interested in the databank should contact Harald Wallbot e-mailwallbottharaedvzsbgaca t or fax 43 0662 8044 5126

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 613

were chosen for each of seven basic emotions (happiness sadness feardisgust anger shame and guilt) The following is an example of a guiltvignette lsquolsquoSomeone does not fully participate in a team effort which leads toa bad result for everyone on the teamrsquorsquo An example of an anger vignette islsquolsquoSomeone learns that somebody close to him has been spreading negativerumours about himrsquorsquo (The complete set of 28 vignettes is available from thefirst author)

Dependent measures Participants were asked to indicate for nine emotions(happiness serenity sadness fear disgust contempt anger shame and guilt)the percentage of men and women as well as the percentage of Anglophonesand Francophones2 who would react by expressing each of these emotions inthe situation described in the vignette Although the stimulus events wereselected to involve only seven of these basic emotions lsquolsquoserenityrsquorsquo was added tothe rating scale to provide a second positive affective state that could be viewedas a different level of happiness lsquolsquoContemptrsquorsquo was included because someinvestigators argue that it is separable from disgust though often confused withit (Ekman amp Friesen 1986)

Participants A total of 544 male and female participants were recruitedfrom junior colleges in a suburb of a large urban centre and in a small town in arural area of Quebec Table 1 shows the number of subjects for each conditionand location

Procedure Participants completed the questionnaire in various sizedmixed-sex groups They were told that it assesses the types of emotionalreactions that we generally expect from members of various social groups Theywere informed of their right to discontinue participation at any time and for anyreason The experimenter then distributed the questionnaires explained the useof the scales and responded to any questions regarding the procedure To limitthe duration of the experiment to approximately 30 minutes so as to avoidfatigue each questionnaire contained only 8 or 12 of the 28 vignettes Thevignettes were arbitrarily divided into three sets for presentation to theparticipants those describing anger and disgust situations those for sadness andfear situations and finally those for guilt and shame situations For a third of theparticipants the four happiness vignettes were included in the set of situationsthey responded to

Data reduction and analyses The ratings for the four vignettes associatedwith each specific emotion were averaged All analyses were conducted on these

2The last two ratings served as distractors for this study and were not included in the analyses(see Eagly amp Mladinic 1989 for a similar approach)

614 HESS ET AL

means To assess differences in expected emotional reactions for men andwomen profile analyses were employed Profile analyses permit us to assesswhether emotion ratings varied as a function of the sex of the protagonist If menand women are perceived to react differently then the profiles will benonparallel If they are expected to react in a similar manner even thoughpossibly at different overall levels the profiles will be parallel Differences inthe overall level of emotional responding can be diagnosed by assessing whetherthe profiles are coincident

Results

Sex of rater The emotion expression profiles for male and femaleparticipants were compared for each of the seven emotion situations separatelyfor the rural and the urban sample and for menrsquos and womenrsquos expectedreactions The results from 26 of the resulting 28 profile analyses show that theprofiles are parallel and coincident That is male and female participantsrsquojudgements described the same emotion profiles with comparable levels for allemotions The data from male and female participants were therefore collapsedfor all further analyses

TABLE 1Number sex and location of participants as a

function of condition (Study 1)

Number of subjects

Condition Men Women Total

Anger-DisgustUrban 55 37 92Rural 31 58 89Total 86 95 181

Shame-GuiltUrban 35 56 91Rural 32 56 88Total 67 112 179

Sadness-FearUrban 55 43 98Rural 23 56 86Total 78 106 184

HappinessUrban 75 56 141Rural 45 87 132Total 120 143 263

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 615

Emotion profiles As expected distinct profiles emerged for each of theemotion themes (see Figures 1andashg) Further the profiles describing menrsquos andwomenrsquos perceived reactions were not parallel (see later) however the profileswere generally similar with regard to their major features As the focus of thepresent paper concerns sex differences we will restrict the discussion of theoverall form of the profiles to two general observations First the profiles for allnegative emotion situations show a prominent peak for the target emotion aswell as secondary peaks That is the perceived reactions to the emotional eventsused here typically involved both secondary emotions as well as a modalemotion It should be noted that an inspection of the raw data suggests that thepeaks for both modal and secondary emotions are reflected in the individualratings and are not an artefact of averaging over divergent ratings Put anotherway the derived lsquolsquoaveragersquorsquo profiles reflect those obtained from individualperceivers

As Figure 1 shows anger sadness and contempt were frequently expected toco-occur Further participants expected similar levels of shame and guilt forvignettes involving either of these specific emotions This suggests that thesetwo emotions were not well differentiated by the participants a finding that is inaccordance with the notion that in Western cultures shame and guilt are not asseparate as is the case in some other cultures (see eg Wallbott amp Scherer1994) Second the profile for the happiness-eliciting events was characterisedby the absence of any other expected emotion with the exception of a smallpercentage of occasions where serenity was also anticipated This suggests thathappiness was expected to occur as a relatively lsquolsquopurersquorsquo emotion However as acaveat one should note that only two positive emotions (happiness and serenity)were included in the list of possible emotional reactions and that serenity can beseen as a level of happiness rather than as an emotion distinct from it

Perceived sex differences To assess whether the profiles for menrsquos andwomenrsquos expected reactions to the different emotion eliciting situations wereparallel and coincident profile analyses were conducted on the mean ratings forthe four vignettes representing each emotion These analyses were conductedseparately for the rural and urban samples However the general findings for thetwo samples are identical and most post-hoc comparisons that reach significancein one sample do so in the other Therefore to facilitate the visual presentation ofthe data Figure 1 shows the data combined over the two samples However the F-values for the analyses are presented in Table 2 separately for the two samplesAll analyses and post-hoc tests were conducted with an alpha level of 05

For all emotion situations except shame and happiness profiles for menrsquos andwomenrsquos expected reactions were nonparallel for both samples (see Table 2)For shame vignettes the two profiles from the urban sample were parallelwhereas for happiness the profiles were parallel for both the urban and ruralgroups

616 HESS ET AL

(a)

(b)

Figure 1 Emotion profiles for menrsquos and womenrsquos expected emotional reaction as a function ofemotion theme (Study 1)

(Continued overleaf)

617

(c)

(d)

Figure 1 (Continued)

618

(e)

(f)

Figure 1 (Continued) (Continued overleaf)

619

In general the same differences between menrsquos and womenrsquos expectedemotional reactions were found for all negative emotion vignettes Regardless ofthe central emotion theme of the vignettes univariate post-hoc tests on theparticipantsrsquo ratings of expected anger happiness and serenity either revealedno differences in expected reactions between men and women or they revealedthat a higher percentage of men than women were expected to react with theseemotion displays Men were judged to be significantly more likely to expressanger in sadness anger shame and fear situations Further men were judged tobe significantly more likely than women to express happiness in guilt shameand sadness situations and to express serenity in guilt situations

On the other hand a different pattern emerged for participantsrsquo ratings ofexpected sadness fear disgust contempt shame and guilt For these emotionalreactions differences emerged for almost all negative emotion situations and inall cases women were expected to be more likely to react with these emotionsthan were men Specifically univariate post-hoc analyses revealed that womenwere judged to be significantly more likely to react with sadness fear and guiltin all emotion-relevant situations Further women were judged to besignificantly more likely to react with disgust and shame in all emotionsituations except for sadness situations Finally women were judged to besignificantly more likely than men to react with contempt in disgust guilt and

(g)

Figure 1 (Continued)

620 HESS ET AL

shame situations For happiness the profiles for both genders were parallel andcoincident suggesting that raters not only expected the same pattern of reactionsfrom men and women but also at the same level for each emotion

Discussion

In summary the analyses of the emotion profiles suggest the presence of clearexpectancies regarding not only the core emotion for a given type of situationbut also for the secondary emotional reactions that are expected in the situationAlthough the profiles for men and women are relatively similar with regard totheir major features a number of systematic differences in expectationsregarding menrsquos and womenrsquos emotional reactions emerged for the negativeemotion events but not for the positive

This latter finding is in contrast to the literature on the self-reportedfrequency of happiness expressionsexperiences in men and women (eg Allenamp Haccoun 1976) and with the finding that women are both believed and

TABLE 2Results of profile analyses on expected emotionalreactions for men and women in general (Study 1)

Vignettes F df p

AngerUrban 532 8175 001Rural 333 8169 001

DisgustUrban 507 8175 001Rural 461 8169 001

FearUrban 689 8187 001Rural 294 8163 004

SadnessUrban 489 8187 001Rural 267 8163 009

GuiltUrban 414 8173 001Rural 288 8167 005

ShameUrban 277 8173 007Rural 156 8167 140 (ns)

HappinessUrban 174 8273 090 (ns)Rural 127 8255 257 (ns)

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 621

observed to smile more than men (Briton amp Hall 1995) However given themultiple functions of smiles (see eg Fernandez-Dols amp Ruiz-Belda 1995Frank amp Ekman 1993 LaFrance amp Hecht 1995) differences in smiling may notreflect differences in happiness One explanation for this lack of continuity withthe existing literature is that the results of the present study are based on specificvignettes and not on global recollections Thus possible differences in real-world exposure to happiness-eliciting situations are less likely to influence ourfindings than they are to influence more global assessments

For all negative emotion events the profiles were nonparallel3 that is theratings revealed different expectations for men and women The differences areconsistent with the notion that the gender stereotype for emotional expressivenessdoes not assume women to be more expressive for all emotions For examplewomen are not expected to express more disgust and shame in sadness situationsthan are men Also women are expected to react with more contempt than aremen only in disgust guilt and shame situations while for all other situations nodifferences emerge However women are thought to express more sadness fearshame and guilt for all emotion-eliciting situations except for happiness eventsThat is regardless of the emotion theme prevalent in the vignettes women arealways expected to react with more sadness fear shame and guilt

An interesting case regards happiness as a secondary emotion in situationswith a negative core emotion The data reveal that men are typically expected toexperience more happiness in these situations than are women The differencesare strongest for guilt and shame vignettes which involve notions of cheatingand public misbehaviour and might reflect a difference in value structureinherent in the gender stereotype

In sum the results of Study 1 expand our knowledge regarding genderdifferences in emotion stereotypes by considering secondary emotionalresponses as well as modal emotional responses Specifically women are notonly expected to react with more sadness fear shame and guilt in situations forwhich these emotions are central but are expected to do so in all situationsinvolving negative affect Men on the other hand are expected to react withmore anger in a wide variety of situations involving negative affect as well aswith more happiness in some situations involving negative affect This suggeststhat the prevalent emotion stereotype describes womenrsquos predominant emotionalreactions to be more withdrawing (fear and sadness) and self-directed (shameand guilt) whereas menrsquos emotional reactions are seen as more active andaggressive

But to what degree are these general stereotypesexpectations reflected inthe self-perceptions that people have of their own emotional reactions AsJussim et alrsquos (1991) findings show self-perceptions can diverge from thecultural stereotypes Yet Jussim et al also suggest that over time these

3An exception are the shame profiles for the rural sample

622 HESS ET AL

stereotypical beliefs may act as a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy and moveself-perceptions in the direction of being consistent with the stereotype Alsoit is possible that widely held cultural beliefs become prescriptive and thuslead individuals to describe their own behaviour as being in accordance withthe stereotype Gallois (1994) in a review of emotion communication ininterpersonal situations concludes that emotion communication in suchsituations is highly rule-governed A similar perspective underlies Averillrsquos(1997) argument regarding the notion of emotion roles that have entrancerequirements such that for example a successful display of anger presupposessufficient power to adequately address the anger eliciting issue AlsoStoppard and Gruchy (1993) found that individuals anticipate costs andrewards for showing certain emotions in certain contexts Specifically womenexpect more costs when not expressing positive emotions in an lsquolsquootherrsquorsquo-oriented context whereas men expect rewards for showing positive emotionsregardless of context

Taken together these findings from diverse domains suggest that self-perceptions of emotional reactions should show a clear overlap withstereotypical expectations within any particular culture To the degree that weassume that these influences are due to recollection biases we may furtherspeculate that the overlap is less pronounced when asking about behaviouralreactions in particular social contexts than when asking for reactions inlsquolsquogeneralrsquorsquo or independent of a specific social situation Specifically as data onactual behaviour suggest relatively few sex differences in emotional behaviourwhereas the stereotype suggests a wide range of such differences differences inself-perceptions are more likely to be due to the influence of the culturalstereotypes than to actual behavioural differences between the genders Study 2is focused on an analysis of this possibility

STUDY 2

Study 1 confirmed that at least in the Quebec culture there are widely sharedbeliefs concerning how men and women differ in their emotion-relevantexpressive behaviour The central issue to be addressed in Study 2 therefore isthe degree of parallelism that exists between perceptions of how typical malesand females are perceived to respond to emotional events (Study 1) and self-perceptions of onersquos own emotional expressivity

To answer this question men and women drawn from the same population asin Study 1 were asked to indicate for each of the seven types of emotionsituations employed in Study 1 to what degree they expected to react themselveswith each of nine emotions if this event should happen to them In addition weasked participants to indicate the likelihood that they would show each of ninetypes of behaviours corresponding to the nine emotions of the emotion profileThese measures were embedded in a larger questionnaire that assessed beliefs

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 623

regarding emotional reactions of other social groups4 This placement made surethat the cultural beliefs and stereotypes held by the participants regardingemotional expressivity in general were evoked However the specific issue ofsex differences was not alluded to

Method

Participants A total of 360 students attending junior colleges in theMontreal urban region participated in the study Of these only thoseparticipants whose first language learned and still spoken was French whowere born in the province of Quebec (Canada) who had not lived outside ofQuebec for more than five consecutive years and who identified themselvesas either Canadian or Quebecois and not as a member of any other groupwere retained5 The resulting sample consisted of 289 individuals In total163 women and 126 men with a mean age of 1886 years participated ingroups of between 15 and 40 participants Of these 63 men and 85 womencompleted the emotion profiles and 63 men and 78 women completed thebehavioural reactions scale

Procedure Participants were informed of their right to discontinueparticipation at any time and for any reason The experimenter then distributedthe questionnaires The instructions as well as an example were provided on thefirst page The same instructions as employed in Study 1 were used the onlydifference being that participants were told to think about how they would reactand to indicate the likelihood in percent that they themselves would react witheach of the emotionsbehaviours indicated The same instructions were given forboth the emotion profile and the behavioural reactions scale with the onlydifference being that for the latter the word lsquolsquoemotionrsquorsquo was replaced withlsquolsquobehaviourrsquorsquo

Materials For each of seven emotions (happiness anger fear sadnessdisgust shame and guilt) two of the four vignettes employed in Study 1 wereretained Each participant responded to only one vignette for each emotion andvignettes were counterbalanced across participants

4 In the present context only data from the part of the questionnaire asking participants about howthey themselves would react in the described situation will be presented

5These selection criteria were included because the participants for Study 2 were recruited fromseveral Montreal junior colleges with an ethnically diverse population Emotion stereotypes are wellknown to differ between cultures (Kirouac amp Hess 1999) and the participants in Study 1 wererecruited from an ethnically homogenous population To ensure comparability between the twosamples it was therefore necessary to exclude participants from groups not present in the firstsample

624 HESS ET AL

Dependent measures

Emotion profiles These were computed in the same manner as in Study 1That is responses were averaged across the vignettes representing each specificemotion theme

Behavioural reactions scale This scale is intended to assess thebehavioural reactions that are expected for someone who is experiencing theemotional state in question To construct the scale a two-step procedure wasemployed

First 68 students of the University of Quebec at Montreal 54 women and 14men with a mean age of 279 years were asked to list for each of nineemotions (happiness serenity anger disgust fear contempt sadness shameand guilt) the behaviours and observable reactions they associate with eachspecific emotion The answers were compiled into frequency lists andsynonyms were grouped together The three most frequently namedbehaviours for each emotion were retained Due to overlap between someemotions this procedure yielded a list of 22 behaviours For the second step atotal of 44 participants 28 women and 16 men with a mean age of 226years were asked to rate for each behaviour and each of the nine emotionsthe likelihood of observing the behaviour in a person experiencing theemotion using a 7-point scale (1 very unlikely 7 very likely) Behavioursthat received a mean rating of 6 or above for only one emotion comprise thefinal scale

These consisted of the following items6 to laughto get excited (happiness)to trembleto freeze (fear) to hitto insultto criticise (anger) to cryto isolateoneself (sadness) to grimaceto vomit (disgust) to stareto look hard at(contempt) to smileto relaxto contemplate (serenity) to withdrawto loweronersquos headto blush (shame) to justify oneselfto apologise (guilt) On theprofile measure participants were asked to indicate the likelihood as apercentage that they would show each of the behaviours in a situation like theone described in the vignettes

Data analyses Each participant responded to one scenario for each of theseven emotions themes and used only one type of scale As in Study 1 thedata were collapsed over scenarios Because we had responses from morewomen than men for both dependent measures the data for the femaleparticipants were weighted to create equal cell sizes Profile analyses acrossthe nine emotional reactionsbehaviours were conducted to assess sexdifferences

6These items were translated from the original French by the authors

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 625

Results and discussion

As noted earlier the goal of Study 2 was to assess to what degree the self-perceptions of the men and women who participated in this study overlap withthe general stereotypes found in Study 1 To accomplish this the emotionprofiles from Study 1 were compared with the self-reported emotional profilesand with the behavioural reaction profiles collected here

Self-described emotion profiles The means and standard deviations for thenine scales of the emotion profiles for male and female participants arepresented in Table 3 A comparison of these means with those of the profilesfrom Study 1 reveals substantial similarities between the emotional reactionsexpected for oneself and those expected for men and women in general

Behavioral reactions Table 3 shows the means and standard deviations forthe nine behavioural reaction profiles These profiles represent the participantsself-report of the likelihood that they would display these specific behaviours inthe situations described by the vignettes As the focus of this paper is on sex

TABLE 3Means and standard deviations for self-perceptions of emotional reactionsbehaviours

for men and women (Study 2)

Men Women

Situation Mean SD Mean SD

AngerHappiness 262 1224 006 054Laughget excited 790 1826 429 1168Serenity 262 827 135 532Smilerelaxcontemplate 865 2068 435 1185Sadness 2359 2390 4405 3151Cryisolate oneself 935 2083 1825 2250Fear 603 1589 486 1070Tremblefreeze 332 814 630 1155Anger 6268 2873 6076 2928Hitinsultcriticise 3540 3042 2654 2873Disgust 1175 2447 1094 1997Grimacevomit 194 553 286 854Contempt 1865 2505 2102 2543Starelook hard at 2065 2718 1156 2216Shame 286 827 802 1887Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 1044 2187 1038 1642Guilt 349 826 491 1582Justify oneselfapologise 2045 3072 1761 2663

(Continued)

626 HESS ET AL

TABLE 3(Continued)

Men Women

Situation Mean SD Mean SD

DisgustHappiness 611 1714 143 575Laughget excited 1989 2669 915 1825Serenity 611 1855 208 1159Smilerelaxcontemplate 1159t 2113 578 1482Sadness 516 1537 490 1531Cryisolate oneself 073 403 346 1352Fear 373t 1066 911 2018Tremblefreeze 476t 1154 1015 1977Anger 1359 2146 1437 2521Hitinsultcriticise 1214 2210 1186 2151Disgust 5086 3257 5881 3178Grimacevomit 1167 2121 1692 2236Contempt 1798 2226 1750 2706Starelook hard at 1991 2362 1686 2363Shame 1023 1972 1683 2738Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 645 1663 1169 2337Guilt 262 937 119 378Justify oneselfapologise 992 2511 744 1924

SadnessHappiness 317 1280 412 1594Laughget excited 123 789 128 114Serenity 887t 2017 318 1456Smilerelaxcontemplate 621 1848 346 1196Sadness 7690 2816 8251 2258Cryisolate oneself 6008 3131 6736 3059Fear 849t 1820 1546 2637Tremblefreeze 1595 2763 1135 2068Anger 1825 2641 2261 2919Hitinsultcriticise 532 1399 641 1517Disgust 651t 2015 176 940Grimacevomit 790 2017 353 1318Contempt 659 2125 332 1121Starelook hard at 000 000 045 397Shame 214 1050 141 711Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 2008 2916 724 1680Guilt 1524 2494 2141 2985Justify oneselfapologise 315 1065 391 1478

FearHappiness 317 1487 006 054Laughget excited 203 1054 058 361Serenity 587 1698 082 327

(Continued overleaf)

627

TABLE 3(Continued)

Men Women

Situation Mean SD Mean SD

Smilerelaxcontemplate 1048 2243 182 666Sadness 2333 3051 2929 3588Cryisolate oneself 1306 2536 3022 3582Fear 5111 3207 7535 2715Tremblefreeze 2008 2565 3378 3378Anger 2468 3297 1954 2949Hitinsultcriticise 1222 2098 446 1410Disgust 787 1808 1006 2206Grimacevomit 429 1270 365 1115Contempt 1192 2216 1141 2078Starelook hard at 677 1822 391 1405Shame 143 470 200 615Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 1606 2579 1000 2117Guilt 794 2199 369 995Justify oneselfapologise 282 1263 276 1319

ShameHappiness 452 1596 144 1039Laughget excited 1825 2905 1387 1990Serenity 444 1492 182 1028Smilerelaxcontemplate 1206t 2333 623 1262Sadness 1151 2121 2077 2361Cryisolate oneself 334 877 426 1107Fear 1246 2431 1135 1700Tremblefreeze 776 1569 894 1491Anger 1262 2259 1432 2408Hitinsultcriticise 565 1478 314 1140Disgust 206 966 347 1244Grimacevomit 202 590 231 1086Contempt 730 1532 811 1880Starelook hard at 347 833 304 1160Shame 4819 3534 5968 2948Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 2563 2974 2885 2908Guilt 3095 3442 4788 3282Justify oneselfapologise 4379 3144 4256 3074

GuiltHappiness 1024 2432 355 1189Laughget excited 734 2259 584 1761Serenity 262 1008 223 771Smilerelaxcontemplate 645 1692 416 1409Sadness 2003t 2705 2971 3390Cryisolate oneself 960 1992 2273 2979Fear 1778 2667 2653 3305

(Continued)

628

differences we will not discuss these data in detail However two things arenoteworthy First both men and women report lower probabilities that theywould react with a certain behaviour for example lsquolsquoto laughto get excitedrsquorsquothan with the emotion that corresponds to the behaviour (happiness) Thisfinding is not unexpected as individuals do not always express their emotionsoutwardly or may have developed idiosyncratic means of expressing certainemotions Second the profile data for the behaviours resemble strongly theemotional reactions reported For example for anger the highest means arefound for to hitto insultto criticise for to cryto isolate one self and for to stare

TABLE 3(Continued)

Men Women

Situation Mean SD Mean SD

Tremblefreeze 1206 2212 1227 2024Anger 1762 2980 1926 2950Hitinsultcriticise 129 543 221 720Disgust 1248 2569 1152 2402Grimacevomit 581 1642 351 1385Contempt 1603 2857 1464 2611Starelook hard at 129 495 136 485Shame 2667 3227 5375 3467Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 1952 2472 1769 2333Guilt 5071 3885 5753 3372Justify oneselfapologise 4484 3581 4286 3608

HappinessHappiness 8913 1981 9106 1471Laughget excited 5763 3420 6069 3283Serenity 2738t 3650 3906 3797Smilerelaxcontemplate 5451 3445 4647 3432Sadness 127 946 020 123Cryisolate oneself 040 318 029 141Fear 103 372 206 680Tremblefreeze 419t 1313 090 057Anger 032 252 000 000Hitinsultcriticise 000 000 013 114Disgust 048 378 000 000Grimacevomit 000 000 000 000Contempt 081 522 000 000Starelook hard at 355 1392 147 388Shame 111 764 000 000Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 718 1905 687 1859Guilt 270 1526 000 000Justify oneselfapologise 355 1535 090 340

Note Significant differences between men and women tp lt 1 p lt 05 p lt 01 p lt 001

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 629

to look hard at which correspond to anger sadness and contempt reactionsrespectively

However a number of differences between these two types of profiles canalso be observed For example for the emotional reaction profiles for anger andsadness the second highest mean is found for guilt whereas for the behaviouralreaction profiles for these emotions the second highest mean is found for shamebehaviours (to withdrawto lower onersquos headto blush) This findings may be dueto the general confusion between shame and guilt that has been observed forWestern cultures (see eg Wallbott amp Scherer 1994)

Sex differences To assess whether male and female participants differedwith regard to their expected emotional reactions and behaviours in the differentemotion eliciting situations profile analyses were conducted on the ratings foreach emotion situation All analyses and post-hoc tests were conducted at analpha level of 05 The results are shown in Table 4

TABLE 4Results of profile analyses on self-reported likelihood

of emotional reactionsbehaviours for men andwomen (Study 2)

Vignettes F df p

AngerReactions 295 8116 005Behaviours 183 8113 079

DisgustReactions 169 8115 107Behaviours 173 8116 099

FearReactions 330 8116 002Behaviours 390 8116 001

SadnessReactions 207 8116 044Behaviours 170 8115 105

GuiltReactions 186 8117 071Behaviours 130 8115 251

ShameReactions 215 8116 037Behaviours 70 8116 689

HappinessReactions 106 8116 397Behaviours 109 8116 376

630 HESS ET AL

Emotional reactions For all emotion situations except disgust andhappiness the emotional reactions profiles were nonparallel or marginallynonparallel (see Table 4) For the nonparallel profiles post-hoc tests revealedthat a similar pattern of sex differences emerged across the different emotionthemes For happiness and serenity there were either no significant differencesbetween men and women or men reported experiencing these emotions with ahigher probability than did women Conversely for sadness fear shame andguilt there were either no significant sex differences or women reported feelingthese emotions with a higher probability than did men For anger disgust andcontempt reactions no significant differences emerged

Emotional behaviour profiles Only the fear profile was significantlynonparallel (different) for men and women The profiles for anger and disgustwere marginally nonparallel and the remaining profiles were all parallel andcoincident Thus fewer significant differences between menrsquos and womenrsquosexpected behaviours in the situations described by the vignettes were found thanwas the case for the expected emotional reactions in Studies 1 and 2 Yet it isimportant to note that the probabilities reported for the behavioural profiles werelower overall and it is thus possible that this lack of differences is due to a lackof sensitivity of the measure

As postulated based on previous research (eg Crawford Clippax OnyxGault amp Benton 1992) as well as on the emotional reactions profile womenreport a higher probability of either crying or isolating oneself in an angersituation than do men Conversely and in accordance with both the literature onanger expression (see earlier) and the results from the emotional reactionsprofile men report it more likely to hitto insultto criticise than women thoughthis difference is not significant In addition they report that they aresignificantly more likely to stareto look hard (contempt) than do women abehaviour that could also be interpreted as aggressive when shown in responseto an insult

As regards the disgust situations men report that they are more likely tolaughto get excited This sex difference matches the finding for the emotionalreactions profile but was not found in Study 1 Finally for the fear situation menreport that they are more likely to hitto insultto criticise as well as to smiletorelaxto contemplate (serenity) than do women The emotional reactions profilefor fear from this study shows that men report a higher probability of reactingwith serenity but not with anger than do women As these behaviourscorrespond to a macho or cool demeanour in a threatening situation they fit thegeneral stereotype of masculine behaviour Conversely women report to bemore likely to trembleto freeze as well as to cryto isolate one self in fearsituations

In sum although many fewer sex differences reached significance whencomparing self-reported expected behaviours for men and women the pattern of

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 631

results is largely congruent with previous findings Specifically women reporteda higher probability of showing behaviours congruent with sadness and fear thandid men whereas men reported higher probabilities for anger and serenebehaviours In addition men reported a higher probability of showing acontempt behaviour in an anger situation yet the relevant behaviour (to staretolook hard) could be interpreted as aggressive in that context

How congruent are the findings fromStudies 1 and 2

As mentioned earlier not all significant differences found in Study 1 for theexpected reactions for men and women in general were also found for self-reports of expected reactions by men and women for themselves Yet as theresults for the two studies are based on different degrees of freedomsignificance levels cannot be directly compared To assess whether stereotypicaland self-reported sex differences were of similar magnitude we computed theeffect sizes for both studies Table 5 shows Cohenrsquos d for the post-hoc

TABLE 5Cohenrsquos d for sex differences in Studies 1 and 2

Study 1 Study 2

SituationEmotionalreactions

Emotionalreactions

Emotionalbehaviours

AngerHappiness 7023Serenity 7025Sadness 203 073 041Fear 123 030Anger 7055 7030Disgust 068Contempt 7026Shame 117 7035Guilt 129

DisgustHappiness 7032 7037 7047Serenity 7045 7026 7021Sadness 095 027Fear 189 033 033AngerDisgust 160 024 024Contempt 050Shame 062 7028 026Guilt 062 020

(Continued)

632 HESS ET AL

TABLE 5(Continued)

Study 1 Study 2

SituationEmotionalreactions

Emotionalreactions

Emotionalbehaviours

SadnessHappiness 7053Serenity 7032Sadness 184 022 024Fear 171 031Anger 7065 042Disgust 7030 7025Contempt 021Shame 020 7046 054Guilt 176 022 7033

FearHappiness 7021 7030Serenity 7026 7041 7052Sadness 189 055Fear 221 082 046Anger 7084 7043Disgust 067ContemptShame 049 7026Guilt 172 7025

ShameHappiness 7045 7023Serenity 7027 7020 7031Sadness 175 041Fear 128Anger 7069Disgust 065Contempt 054Shame 154 035Guilt 153 050

GuiltHappiness 7107 7035Serenity 7051Sadness 198 032 051Fear 162 029AngerDisgust 128Contempt 075Shame 178 051Guilt 183 020

633

comparisons for each emotion in the profile for the six negative emotionsituations across the two studies For Study 1 the effect sizes for the urban andthe rural sample were combined To facilitate the reading of the table onlydifferences for which d was at least 020 (ie equivalent to a small effect) areshown In general effect sizes for Study 1 are larger than those for Study 2 Foremotional reactions the expected differences between men and women were ofmedium (gt 050) to large (gt 080) size whereas for self-perceptions the expecteddifferences between men and women were small to medium in size

The most stable sex difference across the two studies was found for sadnessboth as a core emotion in sadness vignettes and as a secondary emotion That isfor all negative emotions the general stereotype describes women as reactingwith more sadness and women also perceive themselves as reacting with moresadness andor report more sadness behaviours Further women are expected toreact with (and they self-report) more shame and guilt reactionsbehaviours inshame and guilt situations However for the other negative emotions (angerdisgust sadness and fear) men report higher levels of shame reactions or shamebehaviours (but not both) Finally fear reactions and behaviours are described asmore likely for women in general and women perceive themselves as reactingwith more fear in disgust sadness fear and guilt situations

Another very stable sex difference across studies regards happiness andserenity reactions for negative emotion vignettes Men consistently are bothexpected to react with and self-report more happiness reactions as well ashappiness behaviours for disgust fear and shame vignettes To a lesser degreethis pattern also emerges for sadness and guilt vignettes As mentioned in thediscussion of Study 1 this may reflect differences in the value structure betweenmen and women

In sum a comparison of effect sizes shows considerable consistency acrossthe two studies Specifically noteworthy is the very consistent finding for boththe stereotypical beliefs and the self-reports with regard to sadness reactionswhich are considered as more likely for women than for men for all negativeemotion situations studied

However a number of differences between the general stereotypes and theself-perceptions also emerged specifically with regard to shame reactionsWhereas women are generally believed to be more likely to react with shameto negative emotion events the self-reported likelihood for shame as aconcomitant emotion is higher for men for all situations except for guilt(given the general confusion regarding these states observed in Westerncultures this may be due to shame being a core rather than a concomitantemotion for guilt scenarios) Yet self-reported shame behaviours are morelikely for women than for men in sadness and disgust situations A possibleexplanation is that men are actively trying to not show shame reactionsmdashtoconform to the general stereotypemdashbut are aware that they nonetheless arelikely to feel shame in those situations

634 HESS ET AL

To conclude the general stereotype and self-perceptions of emotionalreactions and behaviours suggest that women react with more sadness to all typesof negative emotion events Further the stereotypes and the self-perceptions arein agreement on menrsquos greater likelihood to react with happiness and serenity to avariety of negative emotions In contrast differences between the generalstereotypes and self-perceptions emerge for shame reactions with men reportingin situations when shame is a secondary emotion a higher likelihood of shamereactions but not necessarily shame behaviours than do women

STUDY 3

The results from Study 2 suggest that the stereotypical beliefs regarding menrsquosand womenrsquos emotional reactions and behaviours in a variety of emotion-inducing situations converge with self-perceptions of menrsquos and womenrsquosemotional reactions and behaviours in those same situations This finding isconsistent with the notion that autobiographic statements that requireparticipants to summarise over a number of related experiences may be biasedby stereotypical expectations (see eg Feldman-Barrett et al 1998) This leadsto the question of whether a similar overlap can also be found for narratives ofsingle specific emotional events from the participantsrsquo past If stereotypesindeed influence the way emotional events are reconstructed in a narrative wewould expect to find that women report more sadness events and express moresadness overall as well as more intense target emotions for all but anger eventsConversely we would expect men to report more situations involving anger aswell as experiencing more happiness and serenity overall

However as Study 3 is based on personal narratives and not on standardisedvignettes such a finding could simply be due to the fact that the emotionantecedent events in a real-life setting differ for men and women To assess thispossibility we decided to measure the emotion antecedent events by means of anappraisal questionnaire that assesses the participantsrsquo perception of the emotionantecedent situation To the degree that perceptions of emotion antecedents aresimilar for men and women while reported emotional reactions differ we canconclude that observed sex differences are not due to differences in theperception of the event per se For example if womenrsquos tendency to report moresadness were due to a difference in the perception of the emotion antecedentsituation we would expect women to report more often that they did not feel thatthey could do anything to change the situation or that they had to adapt to thesituation (as sadness is generally associated with the notion of irrevocable loss)

Overview

For this study we translated and adapted a questionnaire reported by Scherer(1988) that consists of two parts The first part invites the participants todescribe an event during which they experienced an emotion The second part

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 635

asks specific questions regarding the appraisal process We added a section inwhich we asked participants to complete an emotion profile for the event Toavoid the possibility that men and women would relate narratives from widelydifferent types of situations we asked participants to describe an event related tofamily interactions This class of situations should be readily accessible to allparticipants and ensure that emotional events involving human interactionpartners were reported

Allowing participants to choose the type of emotional events they report hasseveral advantages Most importantly we can assess what type of emotionalevents men and women choose to report spontaneously It also permitsparticipants to choose a salient event for which they can recollect theinformation necessary to respond to the appraisal questions On the other handthis approach is unlikely to result in a well-balanced distribution of emotiontopics thus making it difficult or impossible to analyse the data separately fordifferent emotion themes Yet in the context of the present study we were onlyinterested in sex differences in reports and not in absolute levels of responsesStudies 1 and 2 suggest that sex differences are very stable across all negativeemotions We therefore decided to allow participants to choose the emotiontheme and analysed the data collapsed across all negative emotion themes

Method

Participants A total of 171 students 87 men and 84 women with a meanage of 1862 years participated in this study Most of the participants (147) wererecruited from an ethnically homogenous junior college in the larger Montrealurban area (Cegep Lionel-Groulx Ste-Therese Quebec Canada) and partici-pated in groups An additional 24 participants were recruited individually

Procedure The experimenter explained that the study concerned emotionalevents in peoplersquos lives Participants were informed of their right to discontinueparticipation at any time and for any reason The experimenter then distributedthe questionnaires and responded to questions regarding the procedure The tasktook between 10 and 30 minutes Most of this time difference can be attributedto the amount of detail provided in the event description that ranged from acouple of words (eg birth of my daughter) to well over a page

Dependent measures The questionnaire consisted of four parts The firstpart was an open-ended question asking the participants to describe any eventinvolving their family life that led them to experience an emotion Sadnessshame anger guilt joy fear and disgust were provided as examples ofemotions Participants were asked to give a detailed description of the situationincluding the events that led up to it their reactions and those of others presentIn addition they were asked to identify the people involved with respect to their

636 HESS ET AL

relationship with them (eg my partner my sister etc) as well as to identify themain emotion theme of the story This served to ensure that the participantsbased their answers to the following questions on a specific event and not on aclass of similar events

Emotion description The second part of the questionnaire consisted ofquestions regarding when the event happened for how long they felt theemotion and the intensity of the core emotion identified as the emotion theme ofthe story Participants were also asked to indicate whether they tried to hide orcontrol their feelings and to what degree This part also contained the emotionprofile used in Studies 1 and 2 Using this measure participants were asked toindicate to what percentage they had felt each of the nine emotions from theprofile

Appraisal questionnaire A series of questions regarding the appraisal processwere used to assess the emotion antecedent events These questions weretranslated from the questionnaire reported by Scherer (1988) Specificallyparticipants were asked to what degree they had expected the situation to occurhow pleasant or unpleasant they considered the event whether the event helpedor hindered them in achieving their aims to what degree they considered that thesituation or the event that caused the emotion was unjust or unfair whether theevent was caused by their own or by someone elsersquos behaviour to what degreethey considered that the behaviour that caused the event would be judged asimproper or immoral by their acquaintances how the event affected theirfeelings about themselves such as their self-esteem or self-confidence andfinally to what degree the event changed their relationships with the peopleinvolved (all on negative-positive 7-point bipolar scales)

In addition participants were given a list of 11 specific potential causes of theevent (caused it myself natural causes act of god etc) They also evaluatedtheir ability to act upon or to cope with the event and its consequences using ascale involving 5 options The last part of the questionnaire consisted ofquestions regarding the participantsrsquo sex their age and whether they werecurrently seeing someone in a love-based relationship and if so for how long

Results

Of the 171 reported emotion events 147 (74 reported by men and 73 reported bywomen) concerned negative emotional events Of these a total of 62 weresadness events 22 were anger events and 11 were guilt events The remainingevents were distributed over a large number of negative emotions

As expected the very low frequency of reports for specific emotion themesmade separate analyses of reports of these events unfeasible We thereforedecided to perform analyses on the data summed over all negative emotionthemes The 24 events with positive emotion themes were obviously excludedfrom these analyses

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 637

Do women report more sadness events and men more anger events Toaddress this question a chi-square test was performed on the frequency withwhich men and women labeled the reported event as a sad versus an anger eventIn line with the results of Studies 1 and 2 we found men to report more angerevents and women to report more sadness events Specifically 14 men and 8women reported anger events and 25 men and 37 women reported sad events w2

= 355 p = 06 d = 42Do women report more intense core emotions than men For the intensity of

the core emotion experienced during the event women reported significantlyhigher levels (M = 593 SD = 101) than men (M = 554 SD = 123) t(145) =222 p = 028 d = 37

Do women and men report different levels of negative emotions across theemotion profile Figure 2 presents the emotion profiles separately for men andwomen An inspection of the profiles shows that overall men report morehappinessserenity whereas women report higher levels of all other emotionsThe profiles are nonparallel F(8 137) = 5877 p lt 001 Post-hoc analysesrevealed a significant sex difference in self-reported sadness with womenreporting higher levels than men To compare the sex differences in the profiles

Figure 2 Emotion profile for menrsquos and womenrsquos self-reported emotional reactions to negativeemotion events (Study 3)

638 HESS ET AL

found in this study with those from Studies 1 and 2 effect sizes were calculatedUsing the same cut-off point as previously (small effect size d = 020) only twodifferences were found to be stable across the three studies Men report higherlevels of happiness for negative emotion events (d = 7022) and women reporthigher levels of sadness (d = 043) As the latter difference may be due to thehigher frequency of reported sadness events by women we also verified whetherwomen report higher levels of sadness when sadness events are excluded fromthe analysis An inspection of the means revealed a marginally significantdifference in the same direction M = 6472 SD = 3247 and M = 5108 SD =3684 for women and men respectively t(83) = 181 p = 074 d = 40

Are there differences in appraisal patterns between men and women Asmentioned earlier the reported differences in emotional reactions could be dueto differences in the perception of the emotion antecedent events Yet nodifferences in appraisal patterns were found suggesting that emotion antecedentevents were perceived similarly In addition despite the more frequent and moreintense reports of sadness women did not report different coping styles thanmen and did not seem to feel more helpless (38 men vs 34 women report thisreaction) In fact women more frequently report that they felt able to lsquolsquoinfluencethe situation positivelyrsquorsquo (19 women vs 9 men report this reaction though thedifference is not significant)

Discussion

Study 3 extended the study of emotion stereotypes and self-perceptions based onvignettes to narratives of emotional events that the participants had in factexperienced themselves The goal of the study was to investigate whether thefindings from Studies 1 and 2 generalise to such recollections of personal eventsThe results strongly suggest this to be the case Women again report higherlevels of sadness for negative emotion events They also report more sad eventsin general Men on the other hand report more anger events as well as morehappiness for negative emotion events as was found in both Studies 1 and 2 Yetno reported differences in appraisal or coping emerged This suggests that theobserved differences in emotional reactions are not due to a bias in the appraisalprocess nor to an inability to act upon the event

If emotion antecedents do not differ why are differences in emotionalreactions reported We suggest that such differences represent an influence ofthe general emotion stereotype on the narrative reconstruction of a personalevent This conclusion is based on the observation of a null effect and thus opento the critique that the present study lacked the power necessary to detect realdifferences in appraisal between men and women To assess this critique wecalculated the absolute mean effect size for the interval-scaled appraisalquestions to be d = 015 To achieve 80 power a sample of 1100 participantswould be needed These data underscore the very slim differences in appraisals

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 639

between men and women making it highly unlikely that the effects observed inthis study are mediated by a difference in appraisal and thus by a difference inthe perception of the underlying event

CONCLUSIONS

The present series of studies had the goal to assess general emotion stereotypesand their influence on self-perceptions of emotional reactions by men andwomen We wanted to both describe these stereotypes in more detail with regardnot only to the modal emotion for a specific event (such as sadness reactions to aloss) but also with regard to the secondary emotions present in these situationsFurther we wanted to assess to what degree such expectations for men andwomen in general are endorsed by individuals for themselves as well as whetherthey would be spontaneously reported when relating a personally experiencedevent

Two gender differences were found to be stable across all three experimentalparadigms Women are expected to be more likely to react with sadness in allnegative emotion situations they expect themselves to be more likely to reactwith sadness as well as to cry and to withdraw more and finally women reportmore sadness in personal events In contrast men are expected to react withmore happinessserenity during negative emotional situations they expectthemselves to react more frequently this way as well as to laugh and smile moreand to be more relaxed They also tend to report more happiness whendescribing negative personal events

Not all general emotion stereotypes were found in the self-perceptionsstudied in Studies 2 and 3 Specifically according to Study 1 women areexpected to be more likely to react with shame and guilt in all negative emotionsituations Yet women did not expect to do so for themselves in situations otherthan shame and guilt situations and in fact men reported to be more likely toreact with shame in a variety of situations Further men and women did notreport any differences with regard to experiences of shame and guilt during thepersonal events

Study 3 included an appraisal questionnaire to address the question whetherthe self-reported differences in emotionality between men and women are due todifferences in the appraisal of the emotion antecedent events or rather to theinfluence of the prevalent norms No differences in appraisals were detectedsuggesting that the self-reported differences may be due to the normative forcesof the general stereotype rather than to appraisal differences

It may be argued that the Study 3 is based on recollections of past events andthat self-reports of emotional experiences represent after the fact reconstructionsthat differ from the actually experienced emotions during the event (seeParkinson amp Manstead 1993) A related argument may be made for Study 2where participants had to estimate the likelihood of their emotional reactions to

640 HESS ET AL

hypothetical events (even though the latter were chosen to be common everydayevents) This may well be true Yet the question remains why did men andwomen reconstruct the events differently in terms of their emotional reactionsThe answer would then be that the prevalent emotion stereotype which islargely endorsed by the population studied influenced this reconstruction Yetas peoplesrsquo sense of self depends on their past histories this would imply thatreconstructions of emotional events in line with emotion stereotypes mayeventually lead individuals to conform more closely to these stereotypes as theybecome more and more part of their emotional history and eventually of theiremotional self

Manuscript received 30 May 1997Revised manuscript received 23 February 2000

REFERENCES

Adams S Kuebli J Boyle PA amp Fivush R (1995) Gender differences in parent-childconversations about past emotions A longitudinal investigation Sex Roles 33 309ndash323

Allen JG amp Haccoun DM (1976) Sex differences in emotionality A multidimensional approachHuman Relations 29 711ndash722

Averill JR (1997) The emotions An integrative approach In R Hogan JA Johnson amp SRBriggs (Eds) Handbook of personality psychology (pp 513ndash541) San Diego CA AcademicPress

Birnbaum DW (1983) Preschoolersrsquo stereotypes about sex differences in emotionality Areaffirmation Journal of Genetic Psychology 143 139ndash140

Briton NJ amp Hall JA (1995) Gender-based expectancies and observer judgements of smilingJournal of Nonverbal Behavior 19 49ndash65

Brody LR amp Hall JA (1993) Gender and emotion In M Lewis amp JM Haviland (Eds)Handbook of emotions (pp 447-460) New York Guilford Press

Crawford J Clippax S Onyx J Gault U amp Benton P (1992) Emotion and genderConstructing meaning from memory London Sage

Dunn J Bretherton I amp Munn P (1987) Conversations about feeling states between mothers andtheir children Developmental Psychology 23 132ndash139

Eagly AH amp Mladinic A (1989) Gender stereotypes and attitudes toward women and menPersonality and Social Psychology Bulletin 15 543ndash558

Ekman P amp Friesen W (1986) A new pan-cultural facial expression of emotion Motivation andEmotion 10 159ndash168

Feldman-Barrett L Robin L Pietromonaco PR amp Eysell KM (1998) Are women the moreemotional sex Evidence from emotional experiences in social context Cognition and Emotion12 555ndash578

Fernandez-Dols J-M amp Ruiz-Belda M-A (1995) Are smiles a sign of happiness Gold medalwinners at the Olympic Games Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 69 1113ndash1119

Fischer A (1993) Sex differences in emotionality Fact or stereotype Feminism and Psychology 3303ndash318

Fivush R (1989) Exploring differences in the emotional content of mother child conversationsabout the past Sex Roles 20 675ndash691

Frank MG amp Ekman P (1993) Not all smiles are created equal The differences betweenenjoyment and nonenjoymen t smiles [Special Issue Current issues in psychological humorresearch] Humor International Journal of Humor Research 6 9ndash26

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 641

Gallois C (1994) Group membership social rules and power A social psychologica l perspectiveon emotional communication Journal of Pragmatics 22 301ndash324

Hall JA (1984) Nonverbal sex differences Communication accuracy and expressive styleBaltimore MD Johns Hopkins University Press

Izard C (1972) Patterns of emotions A new analysis of anxiety and depression New YorkAcademic Press

Jussim L Milbourn M amp Nelson W (1991) Emotional openness Sex-role stereotypes and self-perceptions Representative Research in Social Psychology 19 35ndash52

Kirouac G amp Hess U (1999) Group membership and the decoding of nonverbal behavior In PPhilippot R Feldman amp E Coats (Eds) The social context of nonverbal behavior (pp 182ndash210) New York Cambridge University Press

Kring AM amp Gordon AH (1998) Sex differences in emotion Expression experience andphysiology Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74 686ndash703

LaFrance M amp Banaji M (1992) Toward a reconsideration of the gender-emotion relationship InMS Clark (Ed) Emotion and social behavior Review of personality and social psychology(Vol 14 pp 178ndash201) Newbury Park CA Sage

LaFrance M amp Hecht MA (1995) Why smiles generate leniency Personality and SocialPsychology Bulletin 21 207ndash214

Lazarus RS (1991) Emotion and adaptation Oxford UK Oxford University PressParkinson B amp Manstead ASR (1993) Making sense of emotion in stories and social life

Cognition and Emotion 7 295ndash323Plutchik R (1980) Emotion A psychoevolutionar y synthesis New York Harper amp RowRime B Mesquita B Philippot P amp Boca S (1991) Beyond the emotional event Six studies on

the social sharing of emotion Cognition and Emotion 5 435ndash465Scherer KR (1988) Appendix C Questionnaire used in the International Survey on Emotion

Antecedents and Reactions (ISEAR) In KR Scherer (Ed) Facets of emotion Recent researchHillsdale NJ Erlbaum

Sherman JW amp Bessenhoff GR (1999) Stereotypes as source monitoring cues On theinteraction between episodic and semantic memory Psychological Science 10 106ndash110

Stoppard JM amp Gruchy CD (1993) Gender context and expression of positive emotionPersonality and Social Psychology Bulletin 19 143ndash150

Tucker JS amp Riggio RE (1988) The role of social skills in encoding posed and spontaneousfacial expressions Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 12 87ndash97

Wallbott HG amp Scherer KR (1994) Cultural determinants in experiencing shame and guilt InJune Price Tangney amp Kurt W Fischer (Eds) Self conscious emotions The psychology of shameand guilt embarrasment and pride (pp 465ndash487) New York Guilford Press

642 HESS ET AL

narratives of a specific emotion event All three types of reports should reflectthe influence of cultural beliefs regarding emotional expressivity but to differentdegrees The level of similarity between these different reports should help usbetter understand the prevalence and influence of these beliefs for situations inwhich people report emotions Further as Jussim et al (1991) suggestdescribing onersquos emotional experiences in terms of culturally shared beliefsabout the nature of these experiences may in the long run lead to changes in theway events are experienced

``Purersquorsquo emotions vs emotion profiles

The body of research on gender stereotypes for emotions briefly reviewedearlier is based primarily on studies that focus either on lsquolsquopurersquorsquo emotionalstates such as in studies on the self-reported frequency of experience of certainemotions on beliefs regarding the frequency with which these emotions areexperienced or on certain behavioural modes for such pure states as in studieson crying when angry

Yet lsquolsquopurersquorsquo emotional states are rare and most emotional situations elicitmore than one emotion with some being more prominent than others (Izard1972 Plutchik 1980) An interesting implication of this is that genderstereotypes regarding differences in emotional expressiveness may not onlyinvolve differences in the expression of a principal emotion (eg sadness inresponse to an irrevocable loss) but also differences regarding the presence ofsecondary emotions such as anger or guilt The presence or absence of thesesecondary emotions in a particular context is likely to have importantimplications for how individuals cope with a given event For example anassertive expression of lsquolsquoself-righteousrsquorsquo anger may not be possible whenfeelings of guilt or shame occur at the same time This suggests that a study onemotional stereotypes should focus not only on lsquolsquocorersquorsquo emotions but shouldinclude an analysis of the secondary emotions that are expected to be elicited inmen and women as well

Overview

Three studies were conducted The first assessed emotional reactions of men andwomen to various emotion-eliciting events Specifically respondents wereasked to indicate the percentage of women and men who would react with eachof nine emotions to a series of short vignettes Study 2 assessed the level towhich participantsrsquo self-perceptions of their emotional reactions paralleled thegeneral stereotypes found in Study 1 For this a subset of the vignettes used inStudy 1 were employed The participantsrsquo task was to indicate for each event thelikelihood as a percentage that they personally would react with each of thenine emotions from the emotion profile when they were confronted with thesituations described in the vignettes Finally in Study 3 participants were asked

612 HESS ET AL

to describe an event that had happened to them in the past and to indicate theemotions they had felt during the event

STUDY 1

The goal of Study 1 was to assess the beliefs held by young adults regarding theemotions likely to be expressed by men and women in specific emotion elicitingsituations Unlike previous research we were interested in assessing thesebeliefs on a lsquolsquoprofilersquorsquo measure of expressivity That is we wanted to discovernot just what individuals perceived to be the modal emotion expressed by malesand females in any given situation but also their views regarding the probabilitythat any of several other basic emotions would be expressed in that situationConsistent with previous research we expected that women would be perceivedto be more expressive of all emotions than would men with the exception ofanger Further we anticipated that the profile measure would reveal consistentgender differences in the secondary or nonmodal emotional responsesassociated with particular eliciting events

Method

Materials The emotion scenarios were taken from a large database of self-reported emotion eliciting events (ISEAR International Survey on EmotionAntecedents and Reactions)1 This database contains self-descriptions ofemotion related events from 2921 participants from 37 countries For each ofseven basic emotions events that were frequently reported as involving thisemotion were selected from the database These descriptions were translatedinto French and any reference to the gender of the protagonist was replaced witha gender neutral noun or preposition

Four men and four women then estimated on 7-point scales to whatextent each event represented each of seven core relational themes Corerelational themes (Lazarus 1991) refer to the common content of eventslikely to elicit a certain emotion (eg for sadness the core relational themeinvolves an irrevocable loss) A 7-point scale regarding the social versusindividual character of each vignette was also completed by the participantsin this pre-test Using these data four vignettes for which the target emotionaltheme was identified and which were perceived as describing social situations

1The data are part of an international project ISEAR (International Survey on EmotionAntecedent s and Reactions) initiated by Klaus Scherer University of Geneva The developmen t ofthe databank has been supported by the Maison des Sciences de lrsquoHomme (Paris France) theThyssen Foundation (Germany) and the Societe Academique de lrsquoUniversite de Geneve(Switzerland) The data bank consortium consists of Agneta Fischer (University of Amsterdam)Pierre Philippot (University of Louvain at Louvain-la-Neuve) and Harald Wallbott (University ofSalzburg) Readers interested in the databank should contact Harald Wallbot e-mailwallbottharaedvzsbgaca t or fax 43 0662 8044 5126

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 613

were chosen for each of seven basic emotions (happiness sadness feardisgust anger shame and guilt) The following is an example of a guiltvignette lsquolsquoSomeone does not fully participate in a team effort which leads toa bad result for everyone on the teamrsquorsquo An example of an anger vignette islsquolsquoSomeone learns that somebody close to him has been spreading negativerumours about himrsquorsquo (The complete set of 28 vignettes is available from thefirst author)

Dependent measures Participants were asked to indicate for nine emotions(happiness serenity sadness fear disgust contempt anger shame and guilt)the percentage of men and women as well as the percentage of Anglophonesand Francophones2 who would react by expressing each of these emotions inthe situation described in the vignette Although the stimulus events wereselected to involve only seven of these basic emotions lsquolsquoserenityrsquorsquo was added tothe rating scale to provide a second positive affective state that could be viewedas a different level of happiness lsquolsquoContemptrsquorsquo was included because someinvestigators argue that it is separable from disgust though often confused withit (Ekman amp Friesen 1986)

Participants A total of 544 male and female participants were recruitedfrom junior colleges in a suburb of a large urban centre and in a small town in arural area of Quebec Table 1 shows the number of subjects for each conditionand location

Procedure Participants completed the questionnaire in various sizedmixed-sex groups They were told that it assesses the types of emotionalreactions that we generally expect from members of various social groups Theywere informed of their right to discontinue participation at any time and for anyreason The experimenter then distributed the questionnaires explained the useof the scales and responded to any questions regarding the procedure To limitthe duration of the experiment to approximately 30 minutes so as to avoidfatigue each questionnaire contained only 8 or 12 of the 28 vignettes Thevignettes were arbitrarily divided into three sets for presentation to theparticipants those describing anger and disgust situations those for sadness andfear situations and finally those for guilt and shame situations For a third of theparticipants the four happiness vignettes were included in the set of situationsthey responded to

Data reduction and analyses The ratings for the four vignettes associatedwith each specific emotion were averaged All analyses were conducted on these

2The last two ratings served as distractors for this study and were not included in the analyses(see Eagly amp Mladinic 1989 for a similar approach)

614 HESS ET AL

means To assess differences in expected emotional reactions for men andwomen profile analyses were employed Profile analyses permit us to assesswhether emotion ratings varied as a function of the sex of the protagonist If menand women are perceived to react differently then the profiles will benonparallel If they are expected to react in a similar manner even thoughpossibly at different overall levels the profiles will be parallel Differences inthe overall level of emotional responding can be diagnosed by assessing whetherthe profiles are coincident

Results

Sex of rater The emotion expression profiles for male and femaleparticipants were compared for each of the seven emotion situations separatelyfor the rural and the urban sample and for menrsquos and womenrsquos expectedreactions The results from 26 of the resulting 28 profile analyses show that theprofiles are parallel and coincident That is male and female participantsrsquojudgements described the same emotion profiles with comparable levels for allemotions The data from male and female participants were therefore collapsedfor all further analyses

TABLE 1Number sex and location of participants as a

function of condition (Study 1)

Number of subjects

Condition Men Women Total

Anger-DisgustUrban 55 37 92Rural 31 58 89Total 86 95 181

Shame-GuiltUrban 35 56 91Rural 32 56 88Total 67 112 179

Sadness-FearUrban 55 43 98Rural 23 56 86Total 78 106 184

HappinessUrban 75 56 141Rural 45 87 132Total 120 143 263

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 615

Emotion profiles As expected distinct profiles emerged for each of theemotion themes (see Figures 1andashg) Further the profiles describing menrsquos andwomenrsquos perceived reactions were not parallel (see later) however the profileswere generally similar with regard to their major features As the focus of thepresent paper concerns sex differences we will restrict the discussion of theoverall form of the profiles to two general observations First the profiles for allnegative emotion situations show a prominent peak for the target emotion aswell as secondary peaks That is the perceived reactions to the emotional eventsused here typically involved both secondary emotions as well as a modalemotion It should be noted that an inspection of the raw data suggests that thepeaks for both modal and secondary emotions are reflected in the individualratings and are not an artefact of averaging over divergent ratings Put anotherway the derived lsquolsquoaveragersquorsquo profiles reflect those obtained from individualperceivers

As Figure 1 shows anger sadness and contempt were frequently expected toco-occur Further participants expected similar levels of shame and guilt forvignettes involving either of these specific emotions This suggests that thesetwo emotions were not well differentiated by the participants a finding that is inaccordance with the notion that in Western cultures shame and guilt are not asseparate as is the case in some other cultures (see eg Wallbott amp Scherer1994) Second the profile for the happiness-eliciting events was characterisedby the absence of any other expected emotion with the exception of a smallpercentage of occasions where serenity was also anticipated This suggests thathappiness was expected to occur as a relatively lsquolsquopurersquorsquo emotion However as acaveat one should note that only two positive emotions (happiness and serenity)were included in the list of possible emotional reactions and that serenity can beseen as a level of happiness rather than as an emotion distinct from it

Perceived sex differences To assess whether the profiles for menrsquos andwomenrsquos expected reactions to the different emotion eliciting situations wereparallel and coincident profile analyses were conducted on the mean ratings forthe four vignettes representing each emotion These analyses were conductedseparately for the rural and urban samples However the general findings for thetwo samples are identical and most post-hoc comparisons that reach significancein one sample do so in the other Therefore to facilitate the visual presentation ofthe data Figure 1 shows the data combined over the two samples However the F-values for the analyses are presented in Table 2 separately for the two samplesAll analyses and post-hoc tests were conducted with an alpha level of 05

For all emotion situations except shame and happiness profiles for menrsquos andwomenrsquos expected reactions were nonparallel for both samples (see Table 2)For shame vignettes the two profiles from the urban sample were parallelwhereas for happiness the profiles were parallel for both the urban and ruralgroups

616 HESS ET AL

(a)

(b)

Figure 1 Emotion profiles for menrsquos and womenrsquos expected emotional reaction as a function ofemotion theme (Study 1)

(Continued overleaf)

617

(c)

(d)

Figure 1 (Continued)

618

(e)

(f)

Figure 1 (Continued) (Continued overleaf)

619

In general the same differences between menrsquos and womenrsquos expectedemotional reactions were found for all negative emotion vignettes Regardless ofthe central emotion theme of the vignettes univariate post-hoc tests on theparticipantsrsquo ratings of expected anger happiness and serenity either revealedno differences in expected reactions between men and women or they revealedthat a higher percentage of men than women were expected to react with theseemotion displays Men were judged to be significantly more likely to expressanger in sadness anger shame and fear situations Further men were judged tobe significantly more likely than women to express happiness in guilt shameand sadness situations and to express serenity in guilt situations

On the other hand a different pattern emerged for participantsrsquo ratings ofexpected sadness fear disgust contempt shame and guilt For these emotionalreactions differences emerged for almost all negative emotion situations and inall cases women were expected to be more likely to react with these emotionsthan were men Specifically univariate post-hoc analyses revealed that womenwere judged to be significantly more likely to react with sadness fear and guiltin all emotion-relevant situations Further women were judged to besignificantly more likely to react with disgust and shame in all emotionsituations except for sadness situations Finally women were judged to besignificantly more likely than men to react with contempt in disgust guilt and

(g)

Figure 1 (Continued)

620 HESS ET AL

shame situations For happiness the profiles for both genders were parallel andcoincident suggesting that raters not only expected the same pattern of reactionsfrom men and women but also at the same level for each emotion

Discussion

In summary the analyses of the emotion profiles suggest the presence of clearexpectancies regarding not only the core emotion for a given type of situationbut also for the secondary emotional reactions that are expected in the situationAlthough the profiles for men and women are relatively similar with regard totheir major features a number of systematic differences in expectationsregarding menrsquos and womenrsquos emotional reactions emerged for the negativeemotion events but not for the positive

This latter finding is in contrast to the literature on the self-reportedfrequency of happiness expressionsexperiences in men and women (eg Allenamp Haccoun 1976) and with the finding that women are both believed and

TABLE 2Results of profile analyses on expected emotionalreactions for men and women in general (Study 1)

Vignettes F df p

AngerUrban 532 8175 001Rural 333 8169 001

DisgustUrban 507 8175 001Rural 461 8169 001

FearUrban 689 8187 001Rural 294 8163 004

SadnessUrban 489 8187 001Rural 267 8163 009

GuiltUrban 414 8173 001Rural 288 8167 005

ShameUrban 277 8173 007Rural 156 8167 140 (ns)

HappinessUrban 174 8273 090 (ns)Rural 127 8255 257 (ns)

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 621

observed to smile more than men (Briton amp Hall 1995) However given themultiple functions of smiles (see eg Fernandez-Dols amp Ruiz-Belda 1995Frank amp Ekman 1993 LaFrance amp Hecht 1995) differences in smiling may notreflect differences in happiness One explanation for this lack of continuity withthe existing literature is that the results of the present study are based on specificvignettes and not on global recollections Thus possible differences in real-world exposure to happiness-eliciting situations are less likely to influence ourfindings than they are to influence more global assessments

For all negative emotion events the profiles were nonparallel3 that is theratings revealed different expectations for men and women The differences areconsistent with the notion that the gender stereotype for emotional expressivenessdoes not assume women to be more expressive for all emotions For examplewomen are not expected to express more disgust and shame in sadness situationsthan are men Also women are expected to react with more contempt than aremen only in disgust guilt and shame situations while for all other situations nodifferences emerge However women are thought to express more sadness fearshame and guilt for all emotion-eliciting situations except for happiness eventsThat is regardless of the emotion theme prevalent in the vignettes women arealways expected to react with more sadness fear shame and guilt

An interesting case regards happiness as a secondary emotion in situationswith a negative core emotion The data reveal that men are typically expected toexperience more happiness in these situations than are women The differencesare strongest for guilt and shame vignettes which involve notions of cheatingand public misbehaviour and might reflect a difference in value structureinherent in the gender stereotype

In sum the results of Study 1 expand our knowledge regarding genderdifferences in emotion stereotypes by considering secondary emotionalresponses as well as modal emotional responses Specifically women are notonly expected to react with more sadness fear shame and guilt in situations forwhich these emotions are central but are expected to do so in all situationsinvolving negative affect Men on the other hand are expected to react withmore anger in a wide variety of situations involving negative affect as well aswith more happiness in some situations involving negative affect This suggeststhat the prevalent emotion stereotype describes womenrsquos predominant emotionalreactions to be more withdrawing (fear and sadness) and self-directed (shameand guilt) whereas menrsquos emotional reactions are seen as more active andaggressive

But to what degree are these general stereotypesexpectations reflected inthe self-perceptions that people have of their own emotional reactions AsJussim et alrsquos (1991) findings show self-perceptions can diverge from thecultural stereotypes Yet Jussim et al also suggest that over time these

3An exception are the shame profiles for the rural sample

622 HESS ET AL

stereotypical beliefs may act as a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy and moveself-perceptions in the direction of being consistent with the stereotype Alsoit is possible that widely held cultural beliefs become prescriptive and thuslead individuals to describe their own behaviour as being in accordance withthe stereotype Gallois (1994) in a review of emotion communication ininterpersonal situations concludes that emotion communication in suchsituations is highly rule-governed A similar perspective underlies Averillrsquos(1997) argument regarding the notion of emotion roles that have entrancerequirements such that for example a successful display of anger presupposessufficient power to adequately address the anger eliciting issue AlsoStoppard and Gruchy (1993) found that individuals anticipate costs andrewards for showing certain emotions in certain contexts Specifically womenexpect more costs when not expressing positive emotions in an lsquolsquootherrsquorsquo-oriented context whereas men expect rewards for showing positive emotionsregardless of context

Taken together these findings from diverse domains suggest that self-perceptions of emotional reactions should show a clear overlap withstereotypical expectations within any particular culture To the degree that weassume that these influences are due to recollection biases we may furtherspeculate that the overlap is less pronounced when asking about behaviouralreactions in particular social contexts than when asking for reactions inlsquolsquogeneralrsquorsquo or independent of a specific social situation Specifically as data onactual behaviour suggest relatively few sex differences in emotional behaviourwhereas the stereotype suggests a wide range of such differences differences inself-perceptions are more likely to be due to the influence of the culturalstereotypes than to actual behavioural differences between the genders Study 2is focused on an analysis of this possibility

STUDY 2

Study 1 confirmed that at least in the Quebec culture there are widely sharedbeliefs concerning how men and women differ in their emotion-relevantexpressive behaviour The central issue to be addressed in Study 2 therefore isthe degree of parallelism that exists between perceptions of how typical malesand females are perceived to respond to emotional events (Study 1) and self-perceptions of onersquos own emotional expressivity

To answer this question men and women drawn from the same population asin Study 1 were asked to indicate for each of the seven types of emotionsituations employed in Study 1 to what degree they expected to react themselveswith each of nine emotions if this event should happen to them In addition weasked participants to indicate the likelihood that they would show each of ninetypes of behaviours corresponding to the nine emotions of the emotion profileThese measures were embedded in a larger questionnaire that assessed beliefs

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 623

regarding emotional reactions of other social groups4 This placement made surethat the cultural beliefs and stereotypes held by the participants regardingemotional expressivity in general were evoked However the specific issue ofsex differences was not alluded to

Method

Participants A total of 360 students attending junior colleges in theMontreal urban region participated in the study Of these only thoseparticipants whose first language learned and still spoken was French whowere born in the province of Quebec (Canada) who had not lived outside ofQuebec for more than five consecutive years and who identified themselvesas either Canadian or Quebecois and not as a member of any other groupwere retained5 The resulting sample consisted of 289 individuals In total163 women and 126 men with a mean age of 1886 years participated ingroups of between 15 and 40 participants Of these 63 men and 85 womencompleted the emotion profiles and 63 men and 78 women completed thebehavioural reactions scale

Procedure Participants were informed of their right to discontinueparticipation at any time and for any reason The experimenter then distributedthe questionnaires The instructions as well as an example were provided on thefirst page The same instructions as employed in Study 1 were used the onlydifference being that participants were told to think about how they would reactand to indicate the likelihood in percent that they themselves would react witheach of the emotionsbehaviours indicated The same instructions were given forboth the emotion profile and the behavioural reactions scale with the onlydifference being that for the latter the word lsquolsquoemotionrsquorsquo was replaced withlsquolsquobehaviourrsquorsquo

Materials For each of seven emotions (happiness anger fear sadnessdisgust shame and guilt) two of the four vignettes employed in Study 1 wereretained Each participant responded to only one vignette for each emotion andvignettes were counterbalanced across participants

4 In the present context only data from the part of the questionnaire asking participants about howthey themselves would react in the described situation will be presented

5These selection criteria were included because the participants for Study 2 were recruited fromseveral Montreal junior colleges with an ethnically diverse population Emotion stereotypes are wellknown to differ between cultures (Kirouac amp Hess 1999) and the participants in Study 1 wererecruited from an ethnically homogenous population To ensure comparability between the twosamples it was therefore necessary to exclude participants from groups not present in the firstsample

624 HESS ET AL

Dependent measures

Emotion profiles These were computed in the same manner as in Study 1That is responses were averaged across the vignettes representing each specificemotion theme

Behavioural reactions scale This scale is intended to assess thebehavioural reactions that are expected for someone who is experiencing theemotional state in question To construct the scale a two-step procedure wasemployed

First 68 students of the University of Quebec at Montreal 54 women and 14men with a mean age of 279 years were asked to list for each of nineemotions (happiness serenity anger disgust fear contempt sadness shameand guilt) the behaviours and observable reactions they associate with eachspecific emotion The answers were compiled into frequency lists andsynonyms were grouped together The three most frequently namedbehaviours for each emotion were retained Due to overlap between someemotions this procedure yielded a list of 22 behaviours For the second step atotal of 44 participants 28 women and 16 men with a mean age of 226years were asked to rate for each behaviour and each of the nine emotionsthe likelihood of observing the behaviour in a person experiencing theemotion using a 7-point scale (1 very unlikely 7 very likely) Behavioursthat received a mean rating of 6 or above for only one emotion comprise thefinal scale

These consisted of the following items6 to laughto get excited (happiness)to trembleto freeze (fear) to hitto insultto criticise (anger) to cryto isolateoneself (sadness) to grimaceto vomit (disgust) to stareto look hard at(contempt) to smileto relaxto contemplate (serenity) to withdrawto loweronersquos headto blush (shame) to justify oneselfto apologise (guilt) On theprofile measure participants were asked to indicate the likelihood as apercentage that they would show each of the behaviours in a situation like theone described in the vignettes

Data analyses Each participant responded to one scenario for each of theseven emotions themes and used only one type of scale As in Study 1 thedata were collapsed over scenarios Because we had responses from morewomen than men for both dependent measures the data for the femaleparticipants were weighted to create equal cell sizes Profile analyses acrossthe nine emotional reactionsbehaviours were conducted to assess sexdifferences

6These items were translated from the original French by the authors

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 625

Results and discussion

As noted earlier the goal of Study 2 was to assess to what degree the self-perceptions of the men and women who participated in this study overlap withthe general stereotypes found in Study 1 To accomplish this the emotionprofiles from Study 1 were compared with the self-reported emotional profilesand with the behavioural reaction profiles collected here

Self-described emotion profiles The means and standard deviations for thenine scales of the emotion profiles for male and female participants arepresented in Table 3 A comparison of these means with those of the profilesfrom Study 1 reveals substantial similarities between the emotional reactionsexpected for oneself and those expected for men and women in general

Behavioral reactions Table 3 shows the means and standard deviations forthe nine behavioural reaction profiles These profiles represent the participantsself-report of the likelihood that they would display these specific behaviours inthe situations described by the vignettes As the focus of this paper is on sex

TABLE 3Means and standard deviations for self-perceptions of emotional reactionsbehaviours

for men and women (Study 2)

Men Women

Situation Mean SD Mean SD

AngerHappiness 262 1224 006 054Laughget excited 790 1826 429 1168Serenity 262 827 135 532Smilerelaxcontemplate 865 2068 435 1185Sadness 2359 2390 4405 3151Cryisolate oneself 935 2083 1825 2250Fear 603 1589 486 1070Tremblefreeze 332 814 630 1155Anger 6268 2873 6076 2928Hitinsultcriticise 3540 3042 2654 2873Disgust 1175 2447 1094 1997Grimacevomit 194 553 286 854Contempt 1865 2505 2102 2543Starelook hard at 2065 2718 1156 2216Shame 286 827 802 1887Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 1044 2187 1038 1642Guilt 349 826 491 1582Justify oneselfapologise 2045 3072 1761 2663

(Continued)

626 HESS ET AL

TABLE 3(Continued)

Men Women

Situation Mean SD Mean SD

DisgustHappiness 611 1714 143 575Laughget excited 1989 2669 915 1825Serenity 611 1855 208 1159Smilerelaxcontemplate 1159t 2113 578 1482Sadness 516 1537 490 1531Cryisolate oneself 073 403 346 1352Fear 373t 1066 911 2018Tremblefreeze 476t 1154 1015 1977Anger 1359 2146 1437 2521Hitinsultcriticise 1214 2210 1186 2151Disgust 5086 3257 5881 3178Grimacevomit 1167 2121 1692 2236Contempt 1798 2226 1750 2706Starelook hard at 1991 2362 1686 2363Shame 1023 1972 1683 2738Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 645 1663 1169 2337Guilt 262 937 119 378Justify oneselfapologise 992 2511 744 1924

SadnessHappiness 317 1280 412 1594Laughget excited 123 789 128 114Serenity 887t 2017 318 1456Smilerelaxcontemplate 621 1848 346 1196Sadness 7690 2816 8251 2258Cryisolate oneself 6008 3131 6736 3059Fear 849t 1820 1546 2637Tremblefreeze 1595 2763 1135 2068Anger 1825 2641 2261 2919Hitinsultcriticise 532 1399 641 1517Disgust 651t 2015 176 940Grimacevomit 790 2017 353 1318Contempt 659 2125 332 1121Starelook hard at 000 000 045 397Shame 214 1050 141 711Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 2008 2916 724 1680Guilt 1524 2494 2141 2985Justify oneselfapologise 315 1065 391 1478

FearHappiness 317 1487 006 054Laughget excited 203 1054 058 361Serenity 587 1698 082 327

(Continued overleaf)

627

TABLE 3(Continued)

Men Women

Situation Mean SD Mean SD

Smilerelaxcontemplate 1048 2243 182 666Sadness 2333 3051 2929 3588Cryisolate oneself 1306 2536 3022 3582Fear 5111 3207 7535 2715Tremblefreeze 2008 2565 3378 3378Anger 2468 3297 1954 2949Hitinsultcriticise 1222 2098 446 1410Disgust 787 1808 1006 2206Grimacevomit 429 1270 365 1115Contempt 1192 2216 1141 2078Starelook hard at 677 1822 391 1405Shame 143 470 200 615Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 1606 2579 1000 2117Guilt 794 2199 369 995Justify oneselfapologise 282 1263 276 1319

ShameHappiness 452 1596 144 1039Laughget excited 1825 2905 1387 1990Serenity 444 1492 182 1028Smilerelaxcontemplate 1206t 2333 623 1262Sadness 1151 2121 2077 2361Cryisolate oneself 334 877 426 1107Fear 1246 2431 1135 1700Tremblefreeze 776 1569 894 1491Anger 1262 2259 1432 2408Hitinsultcriticise 565 1478 314 1140Disgust 206 966 347 1244Grimacevomit 202 590 231 1086Contempt 730 1532 811 1880Starelook hard at 347 833 304 1160Shame 4819 3534 5968 2948Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 2563 2974 2885 2908Guilt 3095 3442 4788 3282Justify oneselfapologise 4379 3144 4256 3074

GuiltHappiness 1024 2432 355 1189Laughget excited 734 2259 584 1761Serenity 262 1008 223 771Smilerelaxcontemplate 645 1692 416 1409Sadness 2003t 2705 2971 3390Cryisolate oneself 960 1992 2273 2979Fear 1778 2667 2653 3305

(Continued)

628

differences we will not discuss these data in detail However two things arenoteworthy First both men and women report lower probabilities that theywould react with a certain behaviour for example lsquolsquoto laughto get excitedrsquorsquothan with the emotion that corresponds to the behaviour (happiness) Thisfinding is not unexpected as individuals do not always express their emotionsoutwardly or may have developed idiosyncratic means of expressing certainemotions Second the profile data for the behaviours resemble strongly theemotional reactions reported For example for anger the highest means arefound for to hitto insultto criticise for to cryto isolate one self and for to stare

TABLE 3(Continued)

Men Women

Situation Mean SD Mean SD

Tremblefreeze 1206 2212 1227 2024Anger 1762 2980 1926 2950Hitinsultcriticise 129 543 221 720Disgust 1248 2569 1152 2402Grimacevomit 581 1642 351 1385Contempt 1603 2857 1464 2611Starelook hard at 129 495 136 485Shame 2667 3227 5375 3467Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 1952 2472 1769 2333Guilt 5071 3885 5753 3372Justify oneselfapologise 4484 3581 4286 3608

HappinessHappiness 8913 1981 9106 1471Laughget excited 5763 3420 6069 3283Serenity 2738t 3650 3906 3797Smilerelaxcontemplate 5451 3445 4647 3432Sadness 127 946 020 123Cryisolate oneself 040 318 029 141Fear 103 372 206 680Tremblefreeze 419t 1313 090 057Anger 032 252 000 000Hitinsultcriticise 000 000 013 114Disgust 048 378 000 000Grimacevomit 000 000 000 000Contempt 081 522 000 000Starelook hard at 355 1392 147 388Shame 111 764 000 000Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 718 1905 687 1859Guilt 270 1526 000 000Justify oneselfapologise 355 1535 090 340

Note Significant differences between men and women tp lt 1 p lt 05 p lt 01 p lt 001

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 629

to look hard at which correspond to anger sadness and contempt reactionsrespectively

However a number of differences between these two types of profiles canalso be observed For example for the emotional reaction profiles for anger andsadness the second highest mean is found for guilt whereas for the behaviouralreaction profiles for these emotions the second highest mean is found for shamebehaviours (to withdrawto lower onersquos headto blush) This findings may be dueto the general confusion between shame and guilt that has been observed forWestern cultures (see eg Wallbott amp Scherer 1994)

Sex differences To assess whether male and female participants differedwith regard to their expected emotional reactions and behaviours in the differentemotion eliciting situations profile analyses were conducted on the ratings foreach emotion situation All analyses and post-hoc tests were conducted at analpha level of 05 The results are shown in Table 4

TABLE 4Results of profile analyses on self-reported likelihood

of emotional reactionsbehaviours for men andwomen (Study 2)

Vignettes F df p

AngerReactions 295 8116 005Behaviours 183 8113 079

DisgustReactions 169 8115 107Behaviours 173 8116 099

FearReactions 330 8116 002Behaviours 390 8116 001

SadnessReactions 207 8116 044Behaviours 170 8115 105

GuiltReactions 186 8117 071Behaviours 130 8115 251

ShameReactions 215 8116 037Behaviours 70 8116 689

HappinessReactions 106 8116 397Behaviours 109 8116 376

630 HESS ET AL

Emotional reactions For all emotion situations except disgust andhappiness the emotional reactions profiles were nonparallel or marginallynonparallel (see Table 4) For the nonparallel profiles post-hoc tests revealedthat a similar pattern of sex differences emerged across the different emotionthemes For happiness and serenity there were either no significant differencesbetween men and women or men reported experiencing these emotions with ahigher probability than did women Conversely for sadness fear shame andguilt there were either no significant sex differences or women reported feelingthese emotions with a higher probability than did men For anger disgust andcontempt reactions no significant differences emerged

Emotional behaviour profiles Only the fear profile was significantlynonparallel (different) for men and women The profiles for anger and disgustwere marginally nonparallel and the remaining profiles were all parallel andcoincident Thus fewer significant differences between menrsquos and womenrsquosexpected behaviours in the situations described by the vignettes were found thanwas the case for the expected emotional reactions in Studies 1 and 2 Yet it isimportant to note that the probabilities reported for the behavioural profiles werelower overall and it is thus possible that this lack of differences is due to a lackof sensitivity of the measure

As postulated based on previous research (eg Crawford Clippax OnyxGault amp Benton 1992) as well as on the emotional reactions profile womenreport a higher probability of either crying or isolating oneself in an angersituation than do men Conversely and in accordance with both the literature onanger expression (see earlier) and the results from the emotional reactionsprofile men report it more likely to hitto insultto criticise than women thoughthis difference is not significant In addition they report that they aresignificantly more likely to stareto look hard (contempt) than do women abehaviour that could also be interpreted as aggressive when shown in responseto an insult

As regards the disgust situations men report that they are more likely tolaughto get excited This sex difference matches the finding for the emotionalreactions profile but was not found in Study 1 Finally for the fear situation menreport that they are more likely to hitto insultto criticise as well as to smiletorelaxto contemplate (serenity) than do women The emotional reactions profilefor fear from this study shows that men report a higher probability of reactingwith serenity but not with anger than do women As these behaviourscorrespond to a macho or cool demeanour in a threatening situation they fit thegeneral stereotype of masculine behaviour Conversely women report to bemore likely to trembleto freeze as well as to cryto isolate one self in fearsituations

In sum although many fewer sex differences reached significance whencomparing self-reported expected behaviours for men and women the pattern of

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 631

results is largely congruent with previous findings Specifically women reporteda higher probability of showing behaviours congruent with sadness and fear thandid men whereas men reported higher probabilities for anger and serenebehaviours In addition men reported a higher probability of showing acontempt behaviour in an anger situation yet the relevant behaviour (to staretolook hard) could be interpreted as aggressive in that context

How congruent are the findings fromStudies 1 and 2

As mentioned earlier not all significant differences found in Study 1 for theexpected reactions for men and women in general were also found for self-reports of expected reactions by men and women for themselves Yet as theresults for the two studies are based on different degrees of freedomsignificance levels cannot be directly compared To assess whether stereotypicaland self-reported sex differences were of similar magnitude we computed theeffect sizes for both studies Table 5 shows Cohenrsquos d for the post-hoc

TABLE 5Cohenrsquos d for sex differences in Studies 1 and 2

Study 1 Study 2

SituationEmotionalreactions

Emotionalreactions

Emotionalbehaviours

AngerHappiness 7023Serenity 7025Sadness 203 073 041Fear 123 030Anger 7055 7030Disgust 068Contempt 7026Shame 117 7035Guilt 129

DisgustHappiness 7032 7037 7047Serenity 7045 7026 7021Sadness 095 027Fear 189 033 033AngerDisgust 160 024 024Contempt 050Shame 062 7028 026Guilt 062 020

(Continued)

632 HESS ET AL

TABLE 5(Continued)

Study 1 Study 2

SituationEmotionalreactions

Emotionalreactions

Emotionalbehaviours

SadnessHappiness 7053Serenity 7032Sadness 184 022 024Fear 171 031Anger 7065 042Disgust 7030 7025Contempt 021Shame 020 7046 054Guilt 176 022 7033

FearHappiness 7021 7030Serenity 7026 7041 7052Sadness 189 055Fear 221 082 046Anger 7084 7043Disgust 067ContemptShame 049 7026Guilt 172 7025

ShameHappiness 7045 7023Serenity 7027 7020 7031Sadness 175 041Fear 128Anger 7069Disgust 065Contempt 054Shame 154 035Guilt 153 050

GuiltHappiness 7107 7035Serenity 7051Sadness 198 032 051Fear 162 029AngerDisgust 128Contempt 075Shame 178 051Guilt 183 020

633

comparisons for each emotion in the profile for the six negative emotionsituations across the two studies For Study 1 the effect sizes for the urban andthe rural sample were combined To facilitate the reading of the table onlydifferences for which d was at least 020 (ie equivalent to a small effect) areshown In general effect sizes for Study 1 are larger than those for Study 2 Foremotional reactions the expected differences between men and women were ofmedium (gt 050) to large (gt 080) size whereas for self-perceptions the expecteddifferences between men and women were small to medium in size

The most stable sex difference across the two studies was found for sadnessboth as a core emotion in sadness vignettes and as a secondary emotion That isfor all negative emotions the general stereotype describes women as reactingwith more sadness and women also perceive themselves as reacting with moresadness andor report more sadness behaviours Further women are expected toreact with (and they self-report) more shame and guilt reactionsbehaviours inshame and guilt situations However for the other negative emotions (angerdisgust sadness and fear) men report higher levels of shame reactions or shamebehaviours (but not both) Finally fear reactions and behaviours are described asmore likely for women in general and women perceive themselves as reactingwith more fear in disgust sadness fear and guilt situations

Another very stable sex difference across studies regards happiness andserenity reactions for negative emotion vignettes Men consistently are bothexpected to react with and self-report more happiness reactions as well ashappiness behaviours for disgust fear and shame vignettes To a lesser degreethis pattern also emerges for sadness and guilt vignettes As mentioned in thediscussion of Study 1 this may reflect differences in the value structure betweenmen and women

In sum a comparison of effect sizes shows considerable consistency acrossthe two studies Specifically noteworthy is the very consistent finding for boththe stereotypical beliefs and the self-reports with regard to sadness reactionswhich are considered as more likely for women than for men for all negativeemotion situations studied

However a number of differences between the general stereotypes and theself-perceptions also emerged specifically with regard to shame reactionsWhereas women are generally believed to be more likely to react with shameto negative emotion events the self-reported likelihood for shame as aconcomitant emotion is higher for men for all situations except for guilt(given the general confusion regarding these states observed in Westerncultures this may be due to shame being a core rather than a concomitantemotion for guilt scenarios) Yet self-reported shame behaviours are morelikely for women than for men in sadness and disgust situations A possibleexplanation is that men are actively trying to not show shame reactionsmdashtoconform to the general stereotypemdashbut are aware that they nonetheless arelikely to feel shame in those situations

634 HESS ET AL

To conclude the general stereotype and self-perceptions of emotionalreactions and behaviours suggest that women react with more sadness to all typesof negative emotion events Further the stereotypes and the self-perceptions arein agreement on menrsquos greater likelihood to react with happiness and serenity to avariety of negative emotions In contrast differences between the generalstereotypes and self-perceptions emerge for shame reactions with men reportingin situations when shame is a secondary emotion a higher likelihood of shamereactions but not necessarily shame behaviours than do women

STUDY 3

The results from Study 2 suggest that the stereotypical beliefs regarding menrsquosand womenrsquos emotional reactions and behaviours in a variety of emotion-inducing situations converge with self-perceptions of menrsquos and womenrsquosemotional reactions and behaviours in those same situations This finding isconsistent with the notion that autobiographic statements that requireparticipants to summarise over a number of related experiences may be biasedby stereotypical expectations (see eg Feldman-Barrett et al 1998) This leadsto the question of whether a similar overlap can also be found for narratives ofsingle specific emotional events from the participantsrsquo past If stereotypesindeed influence the way emotional events are reconstructed in a narrative wewould expect to find that women report more sadness events and express moresadness overall as well as more intense target emotions for all but anger eventsConversely we would expect men to report more situations involving anger aswell as experiencing more happiness and serenity overall

However as Study 3 is based on personal narratives and not on standardisedvignettes such a finding could simply be due to the fact that the emotionantecedent events in a real-life setting differ for men and women To assess thispossibility we decided to measure the emotion antecedent events by means of anappraisal questionnaire that assesses the participantsrsquo perception of the emotionantecedent situation To the degree that perceptions of emotion antecedents aresimilar for men and women while reported emotional reactions differ we canconclude that observed sex differences are not due to differences in theperception of the event per se For example if womenrsquos tendency to report moresadness were due to a difference in the perception of the emotion antecedentsituation we would expect women to report more often that they did not feel thatthey could do anything to change the situation or that they had to adapt to thesituation (as sadness is generally associated with the notion of irrevocable loss)

Overview

For this study we translated and adapted a questionnaire reported by Scherer(1988) that consists of two parts The first part invites the participants todescribe an event during which they experienced an emotion The second part

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 635

asks specific questions regarding the appraisal process We added a section inwhich we asked participants to complete an emotion profile for the event Toavoid the possibility that men and women would relate narratives from widelydifferent types of situations we asked participants to describe an event related tofamily interactions This class of situations should be readily accessible to allparticipants and ensure that emotional events involving human interactionpartners were reported

Allowing participants to choose the type of emotional events they report hasseveral advantages Most importantly we can assess what type of emotionalevents men and women choose to report spontaneously It also permitsparticipants to choose a salient event for which they can recollect theinformation necessary to respond to the appraisal questions On the other handthis approach is unlikely to result in a well-balanced distribution of emotiontopics thus making it difficult or impossible to analyse the data separately fordifferent emotion themes Yet in the context of the present study we were onlyinterested in sex differences in reports and not in absolute levels of responsesStudies 1 and 2 suggest that sex differences are very stable across all negativeemotions We therefore decided to allow participants to choose the emotiontheme and analysed the data collapsed across all negative emotion themes

Method

Participants A total of 171 students 87 men and 84 women with a meanage of 1862 years participated in this study Most of the participants (147) wererecruited from an ethnically homogenous junior college in the larger Montrealurban area (Cegep Lionel-Groulx Ste-Therese Quebec Canada) and partici-pated in groups An additional 24 participants were recruited individually

Procedure The experimenter explained that the study concerned emotionalevents in peoplersquos lives Participants were informed of their right to discontinueparticipation at any time and for any reason The experimenter then distributedthe questionnaires and responded to questions regarding the procedure The tasktook between 10 and 30 minutes Most of this time difference can be attributedto the amount of detail provided in the event description that ranged from acouple of words (eg birth of my daughter) to well over a page

Dependent measures The questionnaire consisted of four parts The firstpart was an open-ended question asking the participants to describe any eventinvolving their family life that led them to experience an emotion Sadnessshame anger guilt joy fear and disgust were provided as examples ofemotions Participants were asked to give a detailed description of the situationincluding the events that led up to it their reactions and those of others presentIn addition they were asked to identify the people involved with respect to their

636 HESS ET AL

relationship with them (eg my partner my sister etc) as well as to identify themain emotion theme of the story This served to ensure that the participantsbased their answers to the following questions on a specific event and not on aclass of similar events

Emotion description The second part of the questionnaire consisted ofquestions regarding when the event happened for how long they felt theemotion and the intensity of the core emotion identified as the emotion theme ofthe story Participants were also asked to indicate whether they tried to hide orcontrol their feelings and to what degree This part also contained the emotionprofile used in Studies 1 and 2 Using this measure participants were asked toindicate to what percentage they had felt each of the nine emotions from theprofile

Appraisal questionnaire A series of questions regarding the appraisal processwere used to assess the emotion antecedent events These questions weretranslated from the questionnaire reported by Scherer (1988) Specificallyparticipants were asked to what degree they had expected the situation to occurhow pleasant or unpleasant they considered the event whether the event helpedor hindered them in achieving their aims to what degree they considered that thesituation or the event that caused the emotion was unjust or unfair whether theevent was caused by their own or by someone elsersquos behaviour to what degreethey considered that the behaviour that caused the event would be judged asimproper or immoral by their acquaintances how the event affected theirfeelings about themselves such as their self-esteem or self-confidence andfinally to what degree the event changed their relationships with the peopleinvolved (all on negative-positive 7-point bipolar scales)

In addition participants were given a list of 11 specific potential causes of theevent (caused it myself natural causes act of god etc) They also evaluatedtheir ability to act upon or to cope with the event and its consequences using ascale involving 5 options The last part of the questionnaire consisted ofquestions regarding the participantsrsquo sex their age and whether they werecurrently seeing someone in a love-based relationship and if so for how long

Results

Of the 171 reported emotion events 147 (74 reported by men and 73 reported bywomen) concerned negative emotional events Of these a total of 62 weresadness events 22 were anger events and 11 were guilt events The remainingevents were distributed over a large number of negative emotions

As expected the very low frequency of reports for specific emotion themesmade separate analyses of reports of these events unfeasible We thereforedecided to perform analyses on the data summed over all negative emotionthemes The 24 events with positive emotion themes were obviously excludedfrom these analyses

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 637

Do women report more sadness events and men more anger events Toaddress this question a chi-square test was performed on the frequency withwhich men and women labeled the reported event as a sad versus an anger eventIn line with the results of Studies 1 and 2 we found men to report more angerevents and women to report more sadness events Specifically 14 men and 8women reported anger events and 25 men and 37 women reported sad events w2

= 355 p = 06 d = 42Do women report more intense core emotions than men For the intensity of

the core emotion experienced during the event women reported significantlyhigher levels (M = 593 SD = 101) than men (M = 554 SD = 123) t(145) =222 p = 028 d = 37

Do women and men report different levels of negative emotions across theemotion profile Figure 2 presents the emotion profiles separately for men andwomen An inspection of the profiles shows that overall men report morehappinessserenity whereas women report higher levels of all other emotionsThe profiles are nonparallel F(8 137) = 5877 p lt 001 Post-hoc analysesrevealed a significant sex difference in self-reported sadness with womenreporting higher levels than men To compare the sex differences in the profiles

Figure 2 Emotion profile for menrsquos and womenrsquos self-reported emotional reactions to negativeemotion events (Study 3)

638 HESS ET AL

found in this study with those from Studies 1 and 2 effect sizes were calculatedUsing the same cut-off point as previously (small effect size d = 020) only twodifferences were found to be stable across the three studies Men report higherlevels of happiness for negative emotion events (d = 7022) and women reporthigher levels of sadness (d = 043) As the latter difference may be due to thehigher frequency of reported sadness events by women we also verified whetherwomen report higher levels of sadness when sadness events are excluded fromthe analysis An inspection of the means revealed a marginally significantdifference in the same direction M = 6472 SD = 3247 and M = 5108 SD =3684 for women and men respectively t(83) = 181 p = 074 d = 40

Are there differences in appraisal patterns between men and women Asmentioned earlier the reported differences in emotional reactions could be dueto differences in the perception of the emotion antecedent events Yet nodifferences in appraisal patterns were found suggesting that emotion antecedentevents were perceived similarly In addition despite the more frequent and moreintense reports of sadness women did not report different coping styles thanmen and did not seem to feel more helpless (38 men vs 34 women report thisreaction) In fact women more frequently report that they felt able to lsquolsquoinfluencethe situation positivelyrsquorsquo (19 women vs 9 men report this reaction though thedifference is not significant)

Discussion

Study 3 extended the study of emotion stereotypes and self-perceptions based onvignettes to narratives of emotional events that the participants had in factexperienced themselves The goal of the study was to investigate whether thefindings from Studies 1 and 2 generalise to such recollections of personal eventsThe results strongly suggest this to be the case Women again report higherlevels of sadness for negative emotion events They also report more sad eventsin general Men on the other hand report more anger events as well as morehappiness for negative emotion events as was found in both Studies 1 and 2 Yetno reported differences in appraisal or coping emerged This suggests that theobserved differences in emotional reactions are not due to a bias in the appraisalprocess nor to an inability to act upon the event

If emotion antecedents do not differ why are differences in emotionalreactions reported We suggest that such differences represent an influence ofthe general emotion stereotype on the narrative reconstruction of a personalevent This conclusion is based on the observation of a null effect and thus opento the critique that the present study lacked the power necessary to detect realdifferences in appraisal between men and women To assess this critique wecalculated the absolute mean effect size for the interval-scaled appraisalquestions to be d = 015 To achieve 80 power a sample of 1100 participantswould be needed These data underscore the very slim differences in appraisals

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 639

between men and women making it highly unlikely that the effects observed inthis study are mediated by a difference in appraisal and thus by a difference inthe perception of the underlying event

CONCLUSIONS

The present series of studies had the goal to assess general emotion stereotypesand their influence on self-perceptions of emotional reactions by men andwomen We wanted to both describe these stereotypes in more detail with regardnot only to the modal emotion for a specific event (such as sadness reactions to aloss) but also with regard to the secondary emotions present in these situationsFurther we wanted to assess to what degree such expectations for men andwomen in general are endorsed by individuals for themselves as well as whetherthey would be spontaneously reported when relating a personally experiencedevent

Two gender differences were found to be stable across all three experimentalparadigms Women are expected to be more likely to react with sadness in allnegative emotion situations they expect themselves to be more likely to reactwith sadness as well as to cry and to withdraw more and finally women reportmore sadness in personal events In contrast men are expected to react withmore happinessserenity during negative emotional situations they expectthemselves to react more frequently this way as well as to laugh and smile moreand to be more relaxed They also tend to report more happiness whendescribing negative personal events

Not all general emotion stereotypes were found in the self-perceptionsstudied in Studies 2 and 3 Specifically according to Study 1 women areexpected to be more likely to react with shame and guilt in all negative emotionsituations Yet women did not expect to do so for themselves in situations otherthan shame and guilt situations and in fact men reported to be more likely toreact with shame in a variety of situations Further men and women did notreport any differences with regard to experiences of shame and guilt during thepersonal events

Study 3 included an appraisal questionnaire to address the question whetherthe self-reported differences in emotionality between men and women are due todifferences in the appraisal of the emotion antecedent events or rather to theinfluence of the prevalent norms No differences in appraisals were detectedsuggesting that the self-reported differences may be due to the normative forcesof the general stereotype rather than to appraisal differences

It may be argued that the Study 3 is based on recollections of past events andthat self-reports of emotional experiences represent after the fact reconstructionsthat differ from the actually experienced emotions during the event (seeParkinson amp Manstead 1993) A related argument may be made for Study 2where participants had to estimate the likelihood of their emotional reactions to

640 HESS ET AL

hypothetical events (even though the latter were chosen to be common everydayevents) This may well be true Yet the question remains why did men andwomen reconstruct the events differently in terms of their emotional reactionsThe answer would then be that the prevalent emotion stereotype which islargely endorsed by the population studied influenced this reconstruction Yetas peoplesrsquo sense of self depends on their past histories this would imply thatreconstructions of emotional events in line with emotion stereotypes mayeventually lead individuals to conform more closely to these stereotypes as theybecome more and more part of their emotional history and eventually of theiremotional self

Manuscript received 30 May 1997Revised manuscript received 23 February 2000

REFERENCES

Adams S Kuebli J Boyle PA amp Fivush R (1995) Gender differences in parent-childconversations about past emotions A longitudinal investigation Sex Roles 33 309ndash323

Allen JG amp Haccoun DM (1976) Sex differences in emotionality A multidimensional approachHuman Relations 29 711ndash722

Averill JR (1997) The emotions An integrative approach In R Hogan JA Johnson amp SRBriggs (Eds) Handbook of personality psychology (pp 513ndash541) San Diego CA AcademicPress

Birnbaum DW (1983) Preschoolersrsquo stereotypes about sex differences in emotionality Areaffirmation Journal of Genetic Psychology 143 139ndash140

Briton NJ amp Hall JA (1995) Gender-based expectancies and observer judgements of smilingJournal of Nonverbal Behavior 19 49ndash65

Brody LR amp Hall JA (1993) Gender and emotion In M Lewis amp JM Haviland (Eds)Handbook of emotions (pp 447-460) New York Guilford Press

Crawford J Clippax S Onyx J Gault U amp Benton P (1992) Emotion and genderConstructing meaning from memory London Sage

Dunn J Bretherton I amp Munn P (1987) Conversations about feeling states between mothers andtheir children Developmental Psychology 23 132ndash139

Eagly AH amp Mladinic A (1989) Gender stereotypes and attitudes toward women and menPersonality and Social Psychology Bulletin 15 543ndash558

Ekman P amp Friesen W (1986) A new pan-cultural facial expression of emotion Motivation andEmotion 10 159ndash168

Feldman-Barrett L Robin L Pietromonaco PR amp Eysell KM (1998) Are women the moreemotional sex Evidence from emotional experiences in social context Cognition and Emotion12 555ndash578

Fernandez-Dols J-M amp Ruiz-Belda M-A (1995) Are smiles a sign of happiness Gold medalwinners at the Olympic Games Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 69 1113ndash1119

Fischer A (1993) Sex differences in emotionality Fact or stereotype Feminism and Psychology 3303ndash318

Fivush R (1989) Exploring differences in the emotional content of mother child conversationsabout the past Sex Roles 20 675ndash691

Frank MG amp Ekman P (1993) Not all smiles are created equal The differences betweenenjoyment and nonenjoymen t smiles [Special Issue Current issues in psychological humorresearch] Humor International Journal of Humor Research 6 9ndash26

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 641

Gallois C (1994) Group membership social rules and power A social psychologica l perspectiveon emotional communication Journal of Pragmatics 22 301ndash324

Hall JA (1984) Nonverbal sex differences Communication accuracy and expressive styleBaltimore MD Johns Hopkins University Press

Izard C (1972) Patterns of emotions A new analysis of anxiety and depression New YorkAcademic Press

Jussim L Milbourn M amp Nelson W (1991) Emotional openness Sex-role stereotypes and self-perceptions Representative Research in Social Psychology 19 35ndash52

Kirouac G amp Hess U (1999) Group membership and the decoding of nonverbal behavior In PPhilippot R Feldman amp E Coats (Eds) The social context of nonverbal behavior (pp 182ndash210) New York Cambridge University Press

Kring AM amp Gordon AH (1998) Sex differences in emotion Expression experience andphysiology Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74 686ndash703

LaFrance M amp Banaji M (1992) Toward a reconsideration of the gender-emotion relationship InMS Clark (Ed) Emotion and social behavior Review of personality and social psychology(Vol 14 pp 178ndash201) Newbury Park CA Sage

LaFrance M amp Hecht MA (1995) Why smiles generate leniency Personality and SocialPsychology Bulletin 21 207ndash214

Lazarus RS (1991) Emotion and adaptation Oxford UK Oxford University PressParkinson B amp Manstead ASR (1993) Making sense of emotion in stories and social life

Cognition and Emotion 7 295ndash323Plutchik R (1980) Emotion A psychoevolutionar y synthesis New York Harper amp RowRime B Mesquita B Philippot P amp Boca S (1991) Beyond the emotional event Six studies on

the social sharing of emotion Cognition and Emotion 5 435ndash465Scherer KR (1988) Appendix C Questionnaire used in the International Survey on Emotion

Antecedents and Reactions (ISEAR) In KR Scherer (Ed) Facets of emotion Recent researchHillsdale NJ Erlbaum

Sherman JW amp Bessenhoff GR (1999) Stereotypes as source monitoring cues On theinteraction between episodic and semantic memory Psychological Science 10 106ndash110

Stoppard JM amp Gruchy CD (1993) Gender context and expression of positive emotionPersonality and Social Psychology Bulletin 19 143ndash150

Tucker JS amp Riggio RE (1988) The role of social skills in encoding posed and spontaneousfacial expressions Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 12 87ndash97

Wallbott HG amp Scherer KR (1994) Cultural determinants in experiencing shame and guilt InJune Price Tangney amp Kurt W Fischer (Eds) Self conscious emotions The psychology of shameand guilt embarrasment and pride (pp 465ndash487) New York Guilford Press

642 HESS ET AL

to describe an event that had happened to them in the past and to indicate theemotions they had felt during the event

STUDY 1

The goal of Study 1 was to assess the beliefs held by young adults regarding theemotions likely to be expressed by men and women in specific emotion elicitingsituations Unlike previous research we were interested in assessing thesebeliefs on a lsquolsquoprofilersquorsquo measure of expressivity That is we wanted to discovernot just what individuals perceived to be the modal emotion expressed by malesand females in any given situation but also their views regarding the probabilitythat any of several other basic emotions would be expressed in that situationConsistent with previous research we expected that women would be perceivedto be more expressive of all emotions than would men with the exception ofanger Further we anticipated that the profile measure would reveal consistentgender differences in the secondary or nonmodal emotional responsesassociated with particular eliciting events

Method

Materials The emotion scenarios were taken from a large database of self-reported emotion eliciting events (ISEAR International Survey on EmotionAntecedents and Reactions)1 This database contains self-descriptions ofemotion related events from 2921 participants from 37 countries For each ofseven basic emotions events that were frequently reported as involving thisemotion were selected from the database These descriptions were translatedinto French and any reference to the gender of the protagonist was replaced witha gender neutral noun or preposition

Four men and four women then estimated on 7-point scales to whatextent each event represented each of seven core relational themes Corerelational themes (Lazarus 1991) refer to the common content of eventslikely to elicit a certain emotion (eg for sadness the core relational themeinvolves an irrevocable loss) A 7-point scale regarding the social versusindividual character of each vignette was also completed by the participantsin this pre-test Using these data four vignettes for which the target emotionaltheme was identified and which were perceived as describing social situations

1The data are part of an international project ISEAR (International Survey on EmotionAntecedent s and Reactions) initiated by Klaus Scherer University of Geneva The developmen t ofthe databank has been supported by the Maison des Sciences de lrsquoHomme (Paris France) theThyssen Foundation (Germany) and the Societe Academique de lrsquoUniversite de Geneve(Switzerland) The data bank consortium consists of Agneta Fischer (University of Amsterdam)Pierre Philippot (University of Louvain at Louvain-la-Neuve) and Harald Wallbott (University ofSalzburg) Readers interested in the databank should contact Harald Wallbot e-mailwallbottharaedvzsbgaca t or fax 43 0662 8044 5126

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 613

were chosen for each of seven basic emotions (happiness sadness feardisgust anger shame and guilt) The following is an example of a guiltvignette lsquolsquoSomeone does not fully participate in a team effort which leads toa bad result for everyone on the teamrsquorsquo An example of an anger vignette islsquolsquoSomeone learns that somebody close to him has been spreading negativerumours about himrsquorsquo (The complete set of 28 vignettes is available from thefirst author)

Dependent measures Participants were asked to indicate for nine emotions(happiness serenity sadness fear disgust contempt anger shame and guilt)the percentage of men and women as well as the percentage of Anglophonesand Francophones2 who would react by expressing each of these emotions inthe situation described in the vignette Although the stimulus events wereselected to involve only seven of these basic emotions lsquolsquoserenityrsquorsquo was added tothe rating scale to provide a second positive affective state that could be viewedas a different level of happiness lsquolsquoContemptrsquorsquo was included because someinvestigators argue that it is separable from disgust though often confused withit (Ekman amp Friesen 1986)

Participants A total of 544 male and female participants were recruitedfrom junior colleges in a suburb of a large urban centre and in a small town in arural area of Quebec Table 1 shows the number of subjects for each conditionand location

Procedure Participants completed the questionnaire in various sizedmixed-sex groups They were told that it assesses the types of emotionalreactions that we generally expect from members of various social groups Theywere informed of their right to discontinue participation at any time and for anyreason The experimenter then distributed the questionnaires explained the useof the scales and responded to any questions regarding the procedure To limitthe duration of the experiment to approximately 30 minutes so as to avoidfatigue each questionnaire contained only 8 or 12 of the 28 vignettes Thevignettes were arbitrarily divided into three sets for presentation to theparticipants those describing anger and disgust situations those for sadness andfear situations and finally those for guilt and shame situations For a third of theparticipants the four happiness vignettes were included in the set of situationsthey responded to

Data reduction and analyses The ratings for the four vignettes associatedwith each specific emotion were averaged All analyses were conducted on these

2The last two ratings served as distractors for this study and were not included in the analyses(see Eagly amp Mladinic 1989 for a similar approach)

614 HESS ET AL

means To assess differences in expected emotional reactions for men andwomen profile analyses were employed Profile analyses permit us to assesswhether emotion ratings varied as a function of the sex of the protagonist If menand women are perceived to react differently then the profiles will benonparallel If they are expected to react in a similar manner even thoughpossibly at different overall levels the profiles will be parallel Differences inthe overall level of emotional responding can be diagnosed by assessing whetherthe profiles are coincident

Results

Sex of rater The emotion expression profiles for male and femaleparticipants were compared for each of the seven emotion situations separatelyfor the rural and the urban sample and for menrsquos and womenrsquos expectedreactions The results from 26 of the resulting 28 profile analyses show that theprofiles are parallel and coincident That is male and female participantsrsquojudgements described the same emotion profiles with comparable levels for allemotions The data from male and female participants were therefore collapsedfor all further analyses

TABLE 1Number sex and location of participants as a

function of condition (Study 1)

Number of subjects

Condition Men Women Total

Anger-DisgustUrban 55 37 92Rural 31 58 89Total 86 95 181

Shame-GuiltUrban 35 56 91Rural 32 56 88Total 67 112 179

Sadness-FearUrban 55 43 98Rural 23 56 86Total 78 106 184

HappinessUrban 75 56 141Rural 45 87 132Total 120 143 263

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 615

Emotion profiles As expected distinct profiles emerged for each of theemotion themes (see Figures 1andashg) Further the profiles describing menrsquos andwomenrsquos perceived reactions were not parallel (see later) however the profileswere generally similar with regard to their major features As the focus of thepresent paper concerns sex differences we will restrict the discussion of theoverall form of the profiles to two general observations First the profiles for allnegative emotion situations show a prominent peak for the target emotion aswell as secondary peaks That is the perceived reactions to the emotional eventsused here typically involved both secondary emotions as well as a modalemotion It should be noted that an inspection of the raw data suggests that thepeaks for both modal and secondary emotions are reflected in the individualratings and are not an artefact of averaging over divergent ratings Put anotherway the derived lsquolsquoaveragersquorsquo profiles reflect those obtained from individualperceivers

As Figure 1 shows anger sadness and contempt were frequently expected toco-occur Further participants expected similar levels of shame and guilt forvignettes involving either of these specific emotions This suggests that thesetwo emotions were not well differentiated by the participants a finding that is inaccordance with the notion that in Western cultures shame and guilt are not asseparate as is the case in some other cultures (see eg Wallbott amp Scherer1994) Second the profile for the happiness-eliciting events was characterisedby the absence of any other expected emotion with the exception of a smallpercentage of occasions where serenity was also anticipated This suggests thathappiness was expected to occur as a relatively lsquolsquopurersquorsquo emotion However as acaveat one should note that only two positive emotions (happiness and serenity)were included in the list of possible emotional reactions and that serenity can beseen as a level of happiness rather than as an emotion distinct from it

Perceived sex differences To assess whether the profiles for menrsquos andwomenrsquos expected reactions to the different emotion eliciting situations wereparallel and coincident profile analyses were conducted on the mean ratings forthe four vignettes representing each emotion These analyses were conductedseparately for the rural and urban samples However the general findings for thetwo samples are identical and most post-hoc comparisons that reach significancein one sample do so in the other Therefore to facilitate the visual presentation ofthe data Figure 1 shows the data combined over the two samples However the F-values for the analyses are presented in Table 2 separately for the two samplesAll analyses and post-hoc tests were conducted with an alpha level of 05

For all emotion situations except shame and happiness profiles for menrsquos andwomenrsquos expected reactions were nonparallel for both samples (see Table 2)For shame vignettes the two profiles from the urban sample were parallelwhereas for happiness the profiles were parallel for both the urban and ruralgroups

616 HESS ET AL

(a)

(b)

Figure 1 Emotion profiles for menrsquos and womenrsquos expected emotional reaction as a function ofemotion theme (Study 1)

(Continued overleaf)

617

(c)

(d)

Figure 1 (Continued)

618

(e)

(f)

Figure 1 (Continued) (Continued overleaf)

619

In general the same differences between menrsquos and womenrsquos expectedemotional reactions were found for all negative emotion vignettes Regardless ofthe central emotion theme of the vignettes univariate post-hoc tests on theparticipantsrsquo ratings of expected anger happiness and serenity either revealedno differences in expected reactions between men and women or they revealedthat a higher percentage of men than women were expected to react with theseemotion displays Men were judged to be significantly more likely to expressanger in sadness anger shame and fear situations Further men were judged tobe significantly more likely than women to express happiness in guilt shameand sadness situations and to express serenity in guilt situations

On the other hand a different pattern emerged for participantsrsquo ratings ofexpected sadness fear disgust contempt shame and guilt For these emotionalreactions differences emerged for almost all negative emotion situations and inall cases women were expected to be more likely to react with these emotionsthan were men Specifically univariate post-hoc analyses revealed that womenwere judged to be significantly more likely to react with sadness fear and guiltin all emotion-relevant situations Further women were judged to besignificantly more likely to react with disgust and shame in all emotionsituations except for sadness situations Finally women were judged to besignificantly more likely than men to react with contempt in disgust guilt and

(g)

Figure 1 (Continued)

620 HESS ET AL

shame situations For happiness the profiles for both genders were parallel andcoincident suggesting that raters not only expected the same pattern of reactionsfrom men and women but also at the same level for each emotion

Discussion

In summary the analyses of the emotion profiles suggest the presence of clearexpectancies regarding not only the core emotion for a given type of situationbut also for the secondary emotional reactions that are expected in the situationAlthough the profiles for men and women are relatively similar with regard totheir major features a number of systematic differences in expectationsregarding menrsquos and womenrsquos emotional reactions emerged for the negativeemotion events but not for the positive

This latter finding is in contrast to the literature on the self-reportedfrequency of happiness expressionsexperiences in men and women (eg Allenamp Haccoun 1976) and with the finding that women are both believed and

TABLE 2Results of profile analyses on expected emotionalreactions for men and women in general (Study 1)

Vignettes F df p

AngerUrban 532 8175 001Rural 333 8169 001

DisgustUrban 507 8175 001Rural 461 8169 001

FearUrban 689 8187 001Rural 294 8163 004

SadnessUrban 489 8187 001Rural 267 8163 009

GuiltUrban 414 8173 001Rural 288 8167 005

ShameUrban 277 8173 007Rural 156 8167 140 (ns)

HappinessUrban 174 8273 090 (ns)Rural 127 8255 257 (ns)

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 621

observed to smile more than men (Briton amp Hall 1995) However given themultiple functions of smiles (see eg Fernandez-Dols amp Ruiz-Belda 1995Frank amp Ekman 1993 LaFrance amp Hecht 1995) differences in smiling may notreflect differences in happiness One explanation for this lack of continuity withthe existing literature is that the results of the present study are based on specificvignettes and not on global recollections Thus possible differences in real-world exposure to happiness-eliciting situations are less likely to influence ourfindings than they are to influence more global assessments

For all negative emotion events the profiles were nonparallel3 that is theratings revealed different expectations for men and women The differences areconsistent with the notion that the gender stereotype for emotional expressivenessdoes not assume women to be more expressive for all emotions For examplewomen are not expected to express more disgust and shame in sadness situationsthan are men Also women are expected to react with more contempt than aremen only in disgust guilt and shame situations while for all other situations nodifferences emerge However women are thought to express more sadness fearshame and guilt for all emotion-eliciting situations except for happiness eventsThat is regardless of the emotion theme prevalent in the vignettes women arealways expected to react with more sadness fear shame and guilt

An interesting case regards happiness as a secondary emotion in situationswith a negative core emotion The data reveal that men are typically expected toexperience more happiness in these situations than are women The differencesare strongest for guilt and shame vignettes which involve notions of cheatingand public misbehaviour and might reflect a difference in value structureinherent in the gender stereotype

In sum the results of Study 1 expand our knowledge regarding genderdifferences in emotion stereotypes by considering secondary emotionalresponses as well as modal emotional responses Specifically women are notonly expected to react with more sadness fear shame and guilt in situations forwhich these emotions are central but are expected to do so in all situationsinvolving negative affect Men on the other hand are expected to react withmore anger in a wide variety of situations involving negative affect as well aswith more happiness in some situations involving negative affect This suggeststhat the prevalent emotion stereotype describes womenrsquos predominant emotionalreactions to be more withdrawing (fear and sadness) and self-directed (shameand guilt) whereas menrsquos emotional reactions are seen as more active andaggressive

But to what degree are these general stereotypesexpectations reflected inthe self-perceptions that people have of their own emotional reactions AsJussim et alrsquos (1991) findings show self-perceptions can diverge from thecultural stereotypes Yet Jussim et al also suggest that over time these

3An exception are the shame profiles for the rural sample

622 HESS ET AL

stereotypical beliefs may act as a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy and moveself-perceptions in the direction of being consistent with the stereotype Alsoit is possible that widely held cultural beliefs become prescriptive and thuslead individuals to describe their own behaviour as being in accordance withthe stereotype Gallois (1994) in a review of emotion communication ininterpersonal situations concludes that emotion communication in suchsituations is highly rule-governed A similar perspective underlies Averillrsquos(1997) argument regarding the notion of emotion roles that have entrancerequirements such that for example a successful display of anger presupposessufficient power to adequately address the anger eliciting issue AlsoStoppard and Gruchy (1993) found that individuals anticipate costs andrewards for showing certain emotions in certain contexts Specifically womenexpect more costs when not expressing positive emotions in an lsquolsquootherrsquorsquo-oriented context whereas men expect rewards for showing positive emotionsregardless of context

Taken together these findings from diverse domains suggest that self-perceptions of emotional reactions should show a clear overlap withstereotypical expectations within any particular culture To the degree that weassume that these influences are due to recollection biases we may furtherspeculate that the overlap is less pronounced when asking about behaviouralreactions in particular social contexts than when asking for reactions inlsquolsquogeneralrsquorsquo or independent of a specific social situation Specifically as data onactual behaviour suggest relatively few sex differences in emotional behaviourwhereas the stereotype suggests a wide range of such differences differences inself-perceptions are more likely to be due to the influence of the culturalstereotypes than to actual behavioural differences between the genders Study 2is focused on an analysis of this possibility

STUDY 2

Study 1 confirmed that at least in the Quebec culture there are widely sharedbeliefs concerning how men and women differ in their emotion-relevantexpressive behaviour The central issue to be addressed in Study 2 therefore isthe degree of parallelism that exists between perceptions of how typical malesand females are perceived to respond to emotional events (Study 1) and self-perceptions of onersquos own emotional expressivity

To answer this question men and women drawn from the same population asin Study 1 were asked to indicate for each of the seven types of emotionsituations employed in Study 1 to what degree they expected to react themselveswith each of nine emotions if this event should happen to them In addition weasked participants to indicate the likelihood that they would show each of ninetypes of behaviours corresponding to the nine emotions of the emotion profileThese measures were embedded in a larger questionnaire that assessed beliefs

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 623

regarding emotional reactions of other social groups4 This placement made surethat the cultural beliefs and stereotypes held by the participants regardingemotional expressivity in general were evoked However the specific issue ofsex differences was not alluded to

Method

Participants A total of 360 students attending junior colleges in theMontreal urban region participated in the study Of these only thoseparticipants whose first language learned and still spoken was French whowere born in the province of Quebec (Canada) who had not lived outside ofQuebec for more than five consecutive years and who identified themselvesas either Canadian or Quebecois and not as a member of any other groupwere retained5 The resulting sample consisted of 289 individuals In total163 women and 126 men with a mean age of 1886 years participated ingroups of between 15 and 40 participants Of these 63 men and 85 womencompleted the emotion profiles and 63 men and 78 women completed thebehavioural reactions scale

Procedure Participants were informed of their right to discontinueparticipation at any time and for any reason The experimenter then distributedthe questionnaires The instructions as well as an example were provided on thefirst page The same instructions as employed in Study 1 were used the onlydifference being that participants were told to think about how they would reactand to indicate the likelihood in percent that they themselves would react witheach of the emotionsbehaviours indicated The same instructions were given forboth the emotion profile and the behavioural reactions scale with the onlydifference being that for the latter the word lsquolsquoemotionrsquorsquo was replaced withlsquolsquobehaviourrsquorsquo

Materials For each of seven emotions (happiness anger fear sadnessdisgust shame and guilt) two of the four vignettes employed in Study 1 wereretained Each participant responded to only one vignette for each emotion andvignettes were counterbalanced across participants

4 In the present context only data from the part of the questionnaire asking participants about howthey themselves would react in the described situation will be presented

5These selection criteria were included because the participants for Study 2 were recruited fromseveral Montreal junior colleges with an ethnically diverse population Emotion stereotypes are wellknown to differ between cultures (Kirouac amp Hess 1999) and the participants in Study 1 wererecruited from an ethnically homogenous population To ensure comparability between the twosamples it was therefore necessary to exclude participants from groups not present in the firstsample

624 HESS ET AL

Dependent measures

Emotion profiles These were computed in the same manner as in Study 1That is responses were averaged across the vignettes representing each specificemotion theme

Behavioural reactions scale This scale is intended to assess thebehavioural reactions that are expected for someone who is experiencing theemotional state in question To construct the scale a two-step procedure wasemployed

First 68 students of the University of Quebec at Montreal 54 women and 14men with a mean age of 279 years were asked to list for each of nineemotions (happiness serenity anger disgust fear contempt sadness shameand guilt) the behaviours and observable reactions they associate with eachspecific emotion The answers were compiled into frequency lists andsynonyms were grouped together The three most frequently namedbehaviours for each emotion were retained Due to overlap between someemotions this procedure yielded a list of 22 behaviours For the second step atotal of 44 participants 28 women and 16 men with a mean age of 226years were asked to rate for each behaviour and each of the nine emotionsthe likelihood of observing the behaviour in a person experiencing theemotion using a 7-point scale (1 very unlikely 7 very likely) Behavioursthat received a mean rating of 6 or above for only one emotion comprise thefinal scale

These consisted of the following items6 to laughto get excited (happiness)to trembleto freeze (fear) to hitto insultto criticise (anger) to cryto isolateoneself (sadness) to grimaceto vomit (disgust) to stareto look hard at(contempt) to smileto relaxto contemplate (serenity) to withdrawto loweronersquos headto blush (shame) to justify oneselfto apologise (guilt) On theprofile measure participants were asked to indicate the likelihood as apercentage that they would show each of the behaviours in a situation like theone described in the vignettes

Data analyses Each participant responded to one scenario for each of theseven emotions themes and used only one type of scale As in Study 1 thedata were collapsed over scenarios Because we had responses from morewomen than men for both dependent measures the data for the femaleparticipants were weighted to create equal cell sizes Profile analyses acrossthe nine emotional reactionsbehaviours were conducted to assess sexdifferences

6These items were translated from the original French by the authors

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 625

Results and discussion

As noted earlier the goal of Study 2 was to assess to what degree the self-perceptions of the men and women who participated in this study overlap withthe general stereotypes found in Study 1 To accomplish this the emotionprofiles from Study 1 were compared with the self-reported emotional profilesand with the behavioural reaction profiles collected here

Self-described emotion profiles The means and standard deviations for thenine scales of the emotion profiles for male and female participants arepresented in Table 3 A comparison of these means with those of the profilesfrom Study 1 reveals substantial similarities between the emotional reactionsexpected for oneself and those expected for men and women in general

Behavioral reactions Table 3 shows the means and standard deviations forthe nine behavioural reaction profiles These profiles represent the participantsself-report of the likelihood that they would display these specific behaviours inthe situations described by the vignettes As the focus of this paper is on sex

TABLE 3Means and standard deviations for self-perceptions of emotional reactionsbehaviours

for men and women (Study 2)

Men Women

Situation Mean SD Mean SD

AngerHappiness 262 1224 006 054Laughget excited 790 1826 429 1168Serenity 262 827 135 532Smilerelaxcontemplate 865 2068 435 1185Sadness 2359 2390 4405 3151Cryisolate oneself 935 2083 1825 2250Fear 603 1589 486 1070Tremblefreeze 332 814 630 1155Anger 6268 2873 6076 2928Hitinsultcriticise 3540 3042 2654 2873Disgust 1175 2447 1094 1997Grimacevomit 194 553 286 854Contempt 1865 2505 2102 2543Starelook hard at 2065 2718 1156 2216Shame 286 827 802 1887Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 1044 2187 1038 1642Guilt 349 826 491 1582Justify oneselfapologise 2045 3072 1761 2663

(Continued)

626 HESS ET AL

TABLE 3(Continued)

Men Women

Situation Mean SD Mean SD

DisgustHappiness 611 1714 143 575Laughget excited 1989 2669 915 1825Serenity 611 1855 208 1159Smilerelaxcontemplate 1159t 2113 578 1482Sadness 516 1537 490 1531Cryisolate oneself 073 403 346 1352Fear 373t 1066 911 2018Tremblefreeze 476t 1154 1015 1977Anger 1359 2146 1437 2521Hitinsultcriticise 1214 2210 1186 2151Disgust 5086 3257 5881 3178Grimacevomit 1167 2121 1692 2236Contempt 1798 2226 1750 2706Starelook hard at 1991 2362 1686 2363Shame 1023 1972 1683 2738Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 645 1663 1169 2337Guilt 262 937 119 378Justify oneselfapologise 992 2511 744 1924

SadnessHappiness 317 1280 412 1594Laughget excited 123 789 128 114Serenity 887t 2017 318 1456Smilerelaxcontemplate 621 1848 346 1196Sadness 7690 2816 8251 2258Cryisolate oneself 6008 3131 6736 3059Fear 849t 1820 1546 2637Tremblefreeze 1595 2763 1135 2068Anger 1825 2641 2261 2919Hitinsultcriticise 532 1399 641 1517Disgust 651t 2015 176 940Grimacevomit 790 2017 353 1318Contempt 659 2125 332 1121Starelook hard at 000 000 045 397Shame 214 1050 141 711Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 2008 2916 724 1680Guilt 1524 2494 2141 2985Justify oneselfapologise 315 1065 391 1478

FearHappiness 317 1487 006 054Laughget excited 203 1054 058 361Serenity 587 1698 082 327

(Continued overleaf)

627

TABLE 3(Continued)

Men Women

Situation Mean SD Mean SD

Smilerelaxcontemplate 1048 2243 182 666Sadness 2333 3051 2929 3588Cryisolate oneself 1306 2536 3022 3582Fear 5111 3207 7535 2715Tremblefreeze 2008 2565 3378 3378Anger 2468 3297 1954 2949Hitinsultcriticise 1222 2098 446 1410Disgust 787 1808 1006 2206Grimacevomit 429 1270 365 1115Contempt 1192 2216 1141 2078Starelook hard at 677 1822 391 1405Shame 143 470 200 615Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 1606 2579 1000 2117Guilt 794 2199 369 995Justify oneselfapologise 282 1263 276 1319

ShameHappiness 452 1596 144 1039Laughget excited 1825 2905 1387 1990Serenity 444 1492 182 1028Smilerelaxcontemplate 1206t 2333 623 1262Sadness 1151 2121 2077 2361Cryisolate oneself 334 877 426 1107Fear 1246 2431 1135 1700Tremblefreeze 776 1569 894 1491Anger 1262 2259 1432 2408Hitinsultcriticise 565 1478 314 1140Disgust 206 966 347 1244Grimacevomit 202 590 231 1086Contempt 730 1532 811 1880Starelook hard at 347 833 304 1160Shame 4819 3534 5968 2948Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 2563 2974 2885 2908Guilt 3095 3442 4788 3282Justify oneselfapologise 4379 3144 4256 3074

GuiltHappiness 1024 2432 355 1189Laughget excited 734 2259 584 1761Serenity 262 1008 223 771Smilerelaxcontemplate 645 1692 416 1409Sadness 2003t 2705 2971 3390Cryisolate oneself 960 1992 2273 2979Fear 1778 2667 2653 3305

(Continued)

628

differences we will not discuss these data in detail However two things arenoteworthy First both men and women report lower probabilities that theywould react with a certain behaviour for example lsquolsquoto laughto get excitedrsquorsquothan with the emotion that corresponds to the behaviour (happiness) Thisfinding is not unexpected as individuals do not always express their emotionsoutwardly or may have developed idiosyncratic means of expressing certainemotions Second the profile data for the behaviours resemble strongly theemotional reactions reported For example for anger the highest means arefound for to hitto insultto criticise for to cryto isolate one self and for to stare

TABLE 3(Continued)

Men Women

Situation Mean SD Mean SD

Tremblefreeze 1206 2212 1227 2024Anger 1762 2980 1926 2950Hitinsultcriticise 129 543 221 720Disgust 1248 2569 1152 2402Grimacevomit 581 1642 351 1385Contempt 1603 2857 1464 2611Starelook hard at 129 495 136 485Shame 2667 3227 5375 3467Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 1952 2472 1769 2333Guilt 5071 3885 5753 3372Justify oneselfapologise 4484 3581 4286 3608

HappinessHappiness 8913 1981 9106 1471Laughget excited 5763 3420 6069 3283Serenity 2738t 3650 3906 3797Smilerelaxcontemplate 5451 3445 4647 3432Sadness 127 946 020 123Cryisolate oneself 040 318 029 141Fear 103 372 206 680Tremblefreeze 419t 1313 090 057Anger 032 252 000 000Hitinsultcriticise 000 000 013 114Disgust 048 378 000 000Grimacevomit 000 000 000 000Contempt 081 522 000 000Starelook hard at 355 1392 147 388Shame 111 764 000 000Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 718 1905 687 1859Guilt 270 1526 000 000Justify oneselfapologise 355 1535 090 340

Note Significant differences between men and women tp lt 1 p lt 05 p lt 01 p lt 001

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 629

to look hard at which correspond to anger sadness and contempt reactionsrespectively

However a number of differences between these two types of profiles canalso be observed For example for the emotional reaction profiles for anger andsadness the second highest mean is found for guilt whereas for the behaviouralreaction profiles for these emotions the second highest mean is found for shamebehaviours (to withdrawto lower onersquos headto blush) This findings may be dueto the general confusion between shame and guilt that has been observed forWestern cultures (see eg Wallbott amp Scherer 1994)

Sex differences To assess whether male and female participants differedwith regard to their expected emotional reactions and behaviours in the differentemotion eliciting situations profile analyses were conducted on the ratings foreach emotion situation All analyses and post-hoc tests were conducted at analpha level of 05 The results are shown in Table 4

TABLE 4Results of profile analyses on self-reported likelihood

of emotional reactionsbehaviours for men andwomen (Study 2)

Vignettes F df p

AngerReactions 295 8116 005Behaviours 183 8113 079

DisgustReactions 169 8115 107Behaviours 173 8116 099

FearReactions 330 8116 002Behaviours 390 8116 001

SadnessReactions 207 8116 044Behaviours 170 8115 105

GuiltReactions 186 8117 071Behaviours 130 8115 251

ShameReactions 215 8116 037Behaviours 70 8116 689

HappinessReactions 106 8116 397Behaviours 109 8116 376

630 HESS ET AL

Emotional reactions For all emotion situations except disgust andhappiness the emotional reactions profiles were nonparallel or marginallynonparallel (see Table 4) For the nonparallel profiles post-hoc tests revealedthat a similar pattern of sex differences emerged across the different emotionthemes For happiness and serenity there were either no significant differencesbetween men and women or men reported experiencing these emotions with ahigher probability than did women Conversely for sadness fear shame andguilt there were either no significant sex differences or women reported feelingthese emotions with a higher probability than did men For anger disgust andcontempt reactions no significant differences emerged

Emotional behaviour profiles Only the fear profile was significantlynonparallel (different) for men and women The profiles for anger and disgustwere marginally nonparallel and the remaining profiles were all parallel andcoincident Thus fewer significant differences between menrsquos and womenrsquosexpected behaviours in the situations described by the vignettes were found thanwas the case for the expected emotional reactions in Studies 1 and 2 Yet it isimportant to note that the probabilities reported for the behavioural profiles werelower overall and it is thus possible that this lack of differences is due to a lackof sensitivity of the measure

As postulated based on previous research (eg Crawford Clippax OnyxGault amp Benton 1992) as well as on the emotional reactions profile womenreport a higher probability of either crying or isolating oneself in an angersituation than do men Conversely and in accordance with both the literature onanger expression (see earlier) and the results from the emotional reactionsprofile men report it more likely to hitto insultto criticise than women thoughthis difference is not significant In addition they report that they aresignificantly more likely to stareto look hard (contempt) than do women abehaviour that could also be interpreted as aggressive when shown in responseto an insult

As regards the disgust situations men report that they are more likely tolaughto get excited This sex difference matches the finding for the emotionalreactions profile but was not found in Study 1 Finally for the fear situation menreport that they are more likely to hitto insultto criticise as well as to smiletorelaxto contemplate (serenity) than do women The emotional reactions profilefor fear from this study shows that men report a higher probability of reactingwith serenity but not with anger than do women As these behaviourscorrespond to a macho or cool demeanour in a threatening situation they fit thegeneral stereotype of masculine behaviour Conversely women report to bemore likely to trembleto freeze as well as to cryto isolate one self in fearsituations

In sum although many fewer sex differences reached significance whencomparing self-reported expected behaviours for men and women the pattern of

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 631

results is largely congruent with previous findings Specifically women reporteda higher probability of showing behaviours congruent with sadness and fear thandid men whereas men reported higher probabilities for anger and serenebehaviours In addition men reported a higher probability of showing acontempt behaviour in an anger situation yet the relevant behaviour (to staretolook hard) could be interpreted as aggressive in that context

How congruent are the findings fromStudies 1 and 2

As mentioned earlier not all significant differences found in Study 1 for theexpected reactions for men and women in general were also found for self-reports of expected reactions by men and women for themselves Yet as theresults for the two studies are based on different degrees of freedomsignificance levels cannot be directly compared To assess whether stereotypicaland self-reported sex differences were of similar magnitude we computed theeffect sizes for both studies Table 5 shows Cohenrsquos d for the post-hoc

TABLE 5Cohenrsquos d for sex differences in Studies 1 and 2

Study 1 Study 2

SituationEmotionalreactions

Emotionalreactions

Emotionalbehaviours

AngerHappiness 7023Serenity 7025Sadness 203 073 041Fear 123 030Anger 7055 7030Disgust 068Contempt 7026Shame 117 7035Guilt 129

DisgustHappiness 7032 7037 7047Serenity 7045 7026 7021Sadness 095 027Fear 189 033 033AngerDisgust 160 024 024Contempt 050Shame 062 7028 026Guilt 062 020

(Continued)

632 HESS ET AL

TABLE 5(Continued)

Study 1 Study 2

SituationEmotionalreactions

Emotionalreactions

Emotionalbehaviours

SadnessHappiness 7053Serenity 7032Sadness 184 022 024Fear 171 031Anger 7065 042Disgust 7030 7025Contempt 021Shame 020 7046 054Guilt 176 022 7033

FearHappiness 7021 7030Serenity 7026 7041 7052Sadness 189 055Fear 221 082 046Anger 7084 7043Disgust 067ContemptShame 049 7026Guilt 172 7025

ShameHappiness 7045 7023Serenity 7027 7020 7031Sadness 175 041Fear 128Anger 7069Disgust 065Contempt 054Shame 154 035Guilt 153 050

GuiltHappiness 7107 7035Serenity 7051Sadness 198 032 051Fear 162 029AngerDisgust 128Contempt 075Shame 178 051Guilt 183 020

633

comparisons for each emotion in the profile for the six negative emotionsituations across the two studies For Study 1 the effect sizes for the urban andthe rural sample were combined To facilitate the reading of the table onlydifferences for which d was at least 020 (ie equivalent to a small effect) areshown In general effect sizes for Study 1 are larger than those for Study 2 Foremotional reactions the expected differences between men and women were ofmedium (gt 050) to large (gt 080) size whereas for self-perceptions the expecteddifferences between men and women were small to medium in size

The most stable sex difference across the two studies was found for sadnessboth as a core emotion in sadness vignettes and as a secondary emotion That isfor all negative emotions the general stereotype describes women as reactingwith more sadness and women also perceive themselves as reacting with moresadness andor report more sadness behaviours Further women are expected toreact with (and they self-report) more shame and guilt reactionsbehaviours inshame and guilt situations However for the other negative emotions (angerdisgust sadness and fear) men report higher levels of shame reactions or shamebehaviours (but not both) Finally fear reactions and behaviours are described asmore likely for women in general and women perceive themselves as reactingwith more fear in disgust sadness fear and guilt situations

Another very stable sex difference across studies regards happiness andserenity reactions for negative emotion vignettes Men consistently are bothexpected to react with and self-report more happiness reactions as well ashappiness behaviours for disgust fear and shame vignettes To a lesser degreethis pattern also emerges for sadness and guilt vignettes As mentioned in thediscussion of Study 1 this may reflect differences in the value structure betweenmen and women

In sum a comparison of effect sizes shows considerable consistency acrossthe two studies Specifically noteworthy is the very consistent finding for boththe stereotypical beliefs and the self-reports with regard to sadness reactionswhich are considered as more likely for women than for men for all negativeemotion situations studied

However a number of differences between the general stereotypes and theself-perceptions also emerged specifically with regard to shame reactionsWhereas women are generally believed to be more likely to react with shameto negative emotion events the self-reported likelihood for shame as aconcomitant emotion is higher for men for all situations except for guilt(given the general confusion regarding these states observed in Westerncultures this may be due to shame being a core rather than a concomitantemotion for guilt scenarios) Yet self-reported shame behaviours are morelikely for women than for men in sadness and disgust situations A possibleexplanation is that men are actively trying to not show shame reactionsmdashtoconform to the general stereotypemdashbut are aware that they nonetheless arelikely to feel shame in those situations

634 HESS ET AL

To conclude the general stereotype and self-perceptions of emotionalreactions and behaviours suggest that women react with more sadness to all typesof negative emotion events Further the stereotypes and the self-perceptions arein agreement on menrsquos greater likelihood to react with happiness and serenity to avariety of negative emotions In contrast differences between the generalstereotypes and self-perceptions emerge for shame reactions with men reportingin situations when shame is a secondary emotion a higher likelihood of shamereactions but not necessarily shame behaviours than do women

STUDY 3

The results from Study 2 suggest that the stereotypical beliefs regarding menrsquosand womenrsquos emotional reactions and behaviours in a variety of emotion-inducing situations converge with self-perceptions of menrsquos and womenrsquosemotional reactions and behaviours in those same situations This finding isconsistent with the notion that autobiographic statements that requireparticipants to summarise over a number of related experiences may be biasedby stereotypical expectations (see eg Feldman-Barrett et al 1998) This leadsto the question of whether a similar overlap can also be found for narratives ofsingle specific emotional events from the participantsrsquo past If stereotypesindeed influence the way emotional events are reconstructed in a narrative wewould expect to find that women report more sadness events and express moresadness overall as well as more intense target emotions for all but anger eventsConversely we would expect men to report more situations involving anger aswell as experiencing more happiness and serenity overall

However as Study 3 is based on personal narratives and not on standardisedvignettes such a finding could simply be due to the fact that the emotionantecedent events in a real-life setting differ for men and women To assess thispossibility we decided to measure the emotion antecedent events by means of anappraisal questionnaire that assesses the participantsrsquo perception of the emotionantecedent situation To the degree that perceptions of emotion antecedents aresimilar for men and women while reported emotional reactions differ we canconclude that observed sex differences are not due to differences in theperception of the event per se For example if womenrsquos tendency to report moresadness were due to a difference in the perception of the emotion antecedentsituation we would expect women to report more often that they did not feel thatthey could do anything to change the situation or that they had to adapt to thesituation (as sadness is generally associated with the notion of irrevocable loss)

Overview

For this study we translated and adapted a questionnaire reported by Scherer(1988) that consists of two parts The first part invites the participants todescribe an event during which they experienced an emotion The second part

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 635

asks specific questions regarding the appraisal process We added a section inwhich we asked participants to complete an emotion profile for the event Toavoid the possibility that men and women would relate narratives from widelydifferent types of situations we asked participants to describe an event related tofamily interactions This class of situations should be readily accessible to allparticipants and ensure that emotional events involving human interactionpartners were reported

Allowing participants to choose the type of emotional events they report hasseveral advantages Most importantly we can assess what type of emotionalevents men and women choose to report spontaneously It also permitsparticipants to choose a salient event for which they can recollect theinformation necessary to respond to the appraisal questions On the other handthis approach is unlikely to result in a well-balanced distribution of emotiontopics thus making it difficult or impossible to analyse the data separately fordifferent emotion themes Yet in the context of the present study we were onlyinterested in sex differences in reports and not in absolute levels of responsesStudies 1 and 2 suggest that sex differences are very stable across all negativeemotions We therefore decided to allow participants to choose the emotiontheme and analysed the data collapsed across all negative emotion themes

Method

Participants A total of 171 students 87 men and 84 women with a meanage of 1862 years participated in this study Most of the participants (147) wererecruited from an ethnically homogenous junior college in the larger Montrealurban area (Cegep Lionel-Groulx Ste-Therese Quebec Canada) and partici-pated in groups An additional 24 participants were recruited individually

Procedure The experimenter explained that the study concerned emotionalevents in peoplersquos lives Participants were informed of their right to discontinueparticipation at any time and for any reason The experimenter then distributedthe questionnaires and responded to questions regarding the procedure The tasktook between 10 and 30 minutes Most of this time difference can be attributedto the amount of detail provided in the event description that ranged from acouple of words (eg birth of my daughter) to well over a page

Dependent measures The questionnaire consisted of four parts The firstpart was an open-ended question asking the participants to describe any eventinvolving their family life that led them to experience an emotion Sadnessshame anger guilt joy fear and disgust were provided as examples ofemotions Participants were asked to give a detailed description of the situationincluding the events that led up to it their reactions and those of others presentIn addition they were asked to identify the people involved with respect to their

636 HESS ET AL

relationship with them (eg my partner my sister etc) as well as to identify themain emotion theme of the story This served to ensure that the participantsbased their answers to the following questions on a specific event and not on aclass of similar events

Emotion description The second part of the questionnaire consisted ofquestions regarding when the event happened for how long they felt theemotion and the intensity of the core emotion identified as the emotion theme ofthe story Participants were also asked to indicate whether they tried to hide orcontrol their feelings and to what degree This part also contained the emotionprofile used in Studies 1 and 2 Using this measure participants were asked toindicate to what percentage they had felt each of the nine emotions from theprofile

Appraisal questionnaire A series of questions regarding the appraisal processwere used to assess the emotion antecedent events These questions weretranslated from the questionnaire reported by Scherer (1988) Specificallyparticipants were asked to what degree they had expected the situation to occurhow pleasant or unpleasant they considered the event whether the event helpedor hindered them in achieving their aims to what degree they considered that thesituation or the event that caused the emotion was unjust or unfair whether theevent was caused by their own or by someone elsersquos behaviour to what degreethey considered that the behaviour that caused the event would be judged asimproper or immoral by their acquaintances how the event affected theirfeelings about themselves such as their self-esteem or self-confidence andfinally to what degree the event changed their relationships with the peopleinvolved (all on negative-positive 7-point bipolar scales)

In addition participants were given a list of 11 specific potential causes of theevent (caused it myself natural causes act of god etc) They also evaluatedtheir ability to act upon or to cope with the event and its consequences using ascale involving 5 options The last part of the questionnaire consisted ofquestions regarding the participantsrsquo sex their age and whether they werecurrently seeing someone in a love-based relationship and if so for how long

Results

Of the 171 reported emotion events 147 (74 reported by men and 73 reported bywomen) concerned negative emotional events Of these a total of 62 weresadness events 22 were anger events and 11 were guilt events The remainingevents were distributed over a large number of negative emotions

As expected the very low frequency of reports for specific emotion themesmade separate analyses of reports of these events unfeasible We thereforedecided to perform analyses on the data summed over all negative emotionthemes The 24 events with positive emotion themes were obviously excludedfrom these analyses

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 637

Do women report more sadness events and men more anger events Toaddress this question a chi-square test was performed on the frequency withwhich men and women labeled the reported event as a sad versus an anger eventIn line with the results of Studies 1 and 2 we found men to report more angerevents and women to report more sadness events Specifically 14 men and 8women reported anger events and 25 men and 37 women reported sad events w2

= 355 p = 06 d = 42Do women report more intense core emotions than men For the intensity of

the core emotion experienced during the event women reported significantlyhigher levels (M = 593 SD = 101) than men (M = 554 SD = 123) t(145) =222 p = 028 d = 37

Do women and men report different levels of negative emotions across theemotion profile Figure 2 presents the emotion profiles separately for men andwomen An inspection of the profiles shows that overall men report morehappinessserenity whereas women report higher levels of all other emotionsThe profiles are nonparallel F(8 137) = 5877 p lt 001 Post-hoc analysesrevealed a significant sex difference in self-reported sadness with womenreporting higher levels than men To compare the sex differences in the profiles

Figure 2 Emotion profile for menrsquos and womenrsquos self-reported emotional reactions to negativeemotion events (Study 3)

638 HESS ET AL

found in this study with those from Studies 1 and 2 effect sizes were calculatedUsing the same cut-off point as previously (small effect size d = 020) only twodifferences were found to be stable across the three studies Men report higherlevels of happiness for negative emotion events (d = 7022) and women reporthigher levels of sadness (d = 043) As the latter difference may be due to thehigher frequency of reported sadness events by women we also verified whetherwomen report higher levels of sadness when sadness events are excluded fromthe analysis An inspection of the means revealed a marginally significantdifference in the same direction M = 6472 SD = 3247 and M = 5108 SD =3684 for women and men respectively t(83) = 181 p = 074 d = 40

Are there differences in appraisal patterns between men and women Asmentioned earlier the reported differences in emotional reactions could be dueto differences in the perception of the emotion antecedent events Yet nodifferences in appraisal patterns were found suggesting that emotion antecedentevents were perceived similarly In addition despite the more frequent and moreintense reports of sadness women did not report different coping styles thanmen and did not seem to feel more helpless (38 men vs 34 women report thisreaction) In fact women more frequently report that they felt able to lsquolsquoinfluencethe situation positivelyrsquorsquo (19 women vs 9 men report this reaction though thedifference is not significant)

Discussion

Study 3 extended the study of emotion stereotypes and self-perceptions based onvignettes to narratives of emotional events that the participants had in factexperienced themselves The goal of the study was to investigate whether thefindings from Studies 1 and 2 generalise to such recollections of personal eventsThe results strongly suggest this to be the case Women again report higherlevels of sadness for negative emotion events They also report more sad eventsin general Men on the other hand report more anger events as well as morehappiness for negative emotion events as was found in both Studies 1 and 2 Yetno reported differences in appraisal or coping emerged This suggests that theobserved differences in emotional reactions are not due to a bias in the appraisalprocess nor to an inability to act upon the event

If emotion antecedents do not differ why are differences in emotionalreactions reported We suggest that such differences represent an influence ofthe general emotion stereotype on the narrative reconstruction of a personalevent This conclusion is based on the observation of a null effect and thus opento the critique that the present study lacked the power necessary to detect realdifferences in appraisal between men and women To assess this critique wecalculated the absolute mean effect size for the interval-scaled appraisalquestions to be d = 015 To achieve 80 power a sample of 1100 participantswould be needed These data underscore the very slim differences in appraisals

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 639

between men and women making it highly unlikely that the effects observed inthis study are mediated by a difference in appraisal and thus by a difference inthe perception of the underlying event

CONCLUSIONS

The present series of studies had the goal to assess general emotion stereotypesand their influence on self-perceptions of emotional reactions by men andwomen We wanted to both describe these stereotypes in more detail with regardnot only to the modal emotion for a specific event (such as sadness reactions to aloss) but also with regard to the secondary emotions present in these situationsFurther we wanted to assess to what degree such expectations for men andwomen in general are endorsed by individuals for themselves as well as whetherthey would be spontaneously reported when relating a personally experiencedevent

Two gender differences were found to be stable across all three experimentalparadigms Women are expected to be more likely to react with sadness in allnegative emotion situations they expect themselves to be more likely to reactwith sadness as well as to cry and to withdraw more and finally women reportmore sadness in personal events In contrast men are expected to react withmore happinessserenity during negative emotional situations they expectthemselves to react more frequently this way as well as to laugh and smile moreand to be more relaxed They also tend to report more happiness whendescribing negative personal events

Not all general emotion stereotypes were found in the self-perceptionsstudied in Studies 2 and 3 Specifically according to Study 1 women areexpected to be more likely to react with shame and guilt in all negative emotionsituations Yet women did not expect to do so for themselves in situations otherthan shame and guilt situations and in fact men reported to be more likely toreact with shame in a variety of situations Further men and women did notreport any differences with regard to experiences of shame and guilt during thepersonal events

Study 3 included an appraisal questionnaire to address the question whetherthe self-reported differences in emotionality between men and women are due todifferences in the appraisal of the emotion antecedent events or rather to theinfluence of the prevalent norms No differences in appraisals were detectedsuggesting that the self-reported differences may be due to the normative forcesof the general stereotype rather than to appraisal differences

It may be argued that the Study 3 is based on recollections of past events andthat self-reports of emotional experiences represent after the fact reconstructionsthat differ from the actually experienced emotions during the event (seeParkinson amp Manstead 1993) A related argument may be made for Study 2where participants had to estimate the likelihood of their emotional reactions to

640 HESS ET AL

hypothetical events (even though the latter were chosen to be common everydayevents) This may well be true Yet the question remains why did men andwomen reconstruct the events differently in terms of their emotional reactionsThe answer would then be that the prevalent emotion stereotype which islargely endorsed by the population studied influenced this reconstruction Yetas peoplesrsquo sense of self depends on their past histories this would imply thatreconstructions of emotional events in line with emotion stereotypes mayeventually lead individuals to conform more closely to these stereotypes as theybecome more and more part of their emotional history and eventually of theiremotional self

Manuscript received 30 May 1997Revised manuscript received 23 February 2000

REFERENCES

Adams S Kuebli J Boyle PA amp Fivush R (1995) Gender differences in parent-childconversations about past emotions A longitudinal investigation Sex Roles 33 309ndash323

Allen JG amp Haccoun DM (1976) Sex differences in emotionality A multidimensional approachHuman Relations 29 711ndash722

Averill JR (1997) The emotions An integrative approach In R Hogan JA Johnson amp SRBriggs (Eds) Handbook of personality psychology (pp 513ndash541) San Diego CA AcademicPress

Birnbaum DW (1983) Preschoolersrsquo stereotypes about sex differences in emotionality Areaffirmation Journal of Genetic Psychology 143 139ndash140

Briton NJ amp Hall JA (1995) Gender-based expectancies and observer judgements of smilingJournal of Nonverbal Behavior 19 49ndash65

Brody LR amp Hall JA (1993) Gender and emotion In M Lewis amp JM Haviland (Eds)Handbook of emotions (pp 447-460) New York Guilford Press

Crawford J Clippax S Onyx J Gault U amp Benton P (1992) Emotion and genderConstructing meaning from memory London Sage

Dunn J Bretherton I amp Munn P (1987) Conversations about feeling states between mothers andtheir children Developmental Psychology 23 132ndash139

Eagly AH amp Mladinic A (1989) Gender stereotypes and attitudes toward women and menPersonality and Social Psychology Bulletin 15 543ndash558

Ekman P amp Friesen W (1986) A new pan-cultural facial expression of emotion Motivation andEmotion 10 159ndash168

Feldman-Barrett L Robin L Pietromonaco PR amp Eysell KM (1998) Are women the moreemotional sex Evidence from emotional experiences in social context Cognition and Emotion12 555ndash578

Fernandez-Dols J-M amp Ruiz-Belda M-A (1995) Are smiles a sign of happiness Gold medalwinners at the Olympic Games Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 69 1113ndash1119

Fischer A (1993) Sex differences in emotionality Fact or stereotype Feminism and Psychology 3303ndash318

Fivush R (1989) Exploring differences in the emotional content of mother child conversationsabout the past Sex Roles 20 675ndash691

Frank MG amp Ekman P (1993) Not all smiles are created equal The differences betweenenjoyment and nonenjoymen t smiles [Special Issue Current issues in psychological humorresearch] Humor International Journal of Humor Research 6 9ndash26

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 641

Gallois C (1994) Group membership social rules and power A social psychologica l perspectiveon emotional communication Journal of Pragmatics 22 301ndash324

Hall JA (1984) Nonverbal sex differences Communication accuracy and expressive styleBaltimore MD Johns Hopkins University Press

Izard C (1972) Patterns of emotions A new analysis of anxiety and depression New YorkAcademic Press

Jussim L Milbourn M amp Nelson W (1991) Emotional openness Sex-role stereotypes and self-perceptions Representative Research in Social Psychology 19 35ndash52

Kirouac G amp Hess U (1999) Group membership and the decoding of nonverbal behavior In PPhilippot R Feldman amp E Coats (Eds) The social context of nonverbal behavior (pp 182ndash210) New York Cambridge University Press

Kring AM amp Gordon AH (1998) Sex differences in emotion Expression experience andphysiology Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74 686ndash703

LaFrance M amp Banaji M (1992) Toward a reconsideration of the gender-emotion relationship InMS Clark (Ed) Emotion and social behavior Review of personality and social psychology(Vol 14 pp 178ndash201) Newbury Park CA Sage

LaFrance M amp Hecht MA (1995) Why smiles generate leniency Personality and SocialPsychology Bulletin 21 207ndash214

Lazarus RS (1991) Emotion and adaptation Oxford UK Oxford University PressParkinson B amp Manstead ASR (1993) Making sense of emotion in stories and social life

Cognition and Emotion 7 295ndash323Plutchik R (1980) Emotion A psychoevolutionar y synthesis New York Harper amp RowRime B Mesquita B Philippot P amp Boca S (1991) Beyond the emotional event Six studies on

the social sharing of emotion Cognition and Emotion 5 435ndash465Scherer KR (1988) Appendix C Questionnaire used in the International Survey on Emotion

Antecedents and Reactions (ISEAR) In KR Scherer (Ed) Facets of emotion Recent researchHillsdale NJ Erlbaum

Sherman JW amp Bessenhoff GR (1999) Stereotypes as source monitoring cues On theinteraction between episodic and semantic memory Psychological Science 10 106ndash110

Stoppard JM amp Gruchy CD (1993) Gender context and expression of positive emotionPersonality and Social Psychology Bulletin 19 143ndash150

Tucker JS amp Riggio RE (1988) The role of social skills in encoding posed and spontaneousfacial expressions Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 12 87ndash97

Wallbott HG amp Scherer KR (1994) Cultural determinants in experiencing shame and guilt InJune Price Tangney amp Kurt W Fischer (Eds) Self conscious emotions The psychology of shameand guilt embarrasment and pride (pp 465ndash487) New York Guilford Press

642 HESS ET AL

were chosen for each of seven basic emotions (happiness sadness feardisgust anger shame and guilt) The following is an example of a guiltvignette lsquolsquoSomeone does not fully participate in a team effort which leads toa bad result for everyone on the teamrsquorsquo An example of an anger vignette islsquolsquoSomeone learns that somebody close to him has been spreading negativerumours about himrsquorsquo (The complete set of 28 vignettes is available from thefirst author)

Dependent measures Participants were asked to indicate for nine emotions(happiness serenity sadness fear disgust contempt anger shame and guilt)the percentage of men and women as well as the percentage of Anglophonesand Francophones2 who would react by expressing each of these emotions inthe situation described in the vignette Although the stimulus events wereselected to involve only seven of these basic emotions lsquolsquoserenityrsquorsquo was added tothe rating scale to provide a second positive affective state that could be viewedas a different level of happiness lsquolsquoContemptrsquorsquo was included because someinvestigators argue that it is separable from disgust though often confused withit (Ekman amp Friesen 1986)

Participants A total of 544 male and female participants were recruitedfrom junior colleges in a suburb of a large urban centre and in a small town in arural area of Quebec Table 1 shows the number of subjects for each conditionand location

Procedure Participants completed the questionnaire in various sizedmixed-sex groups They were told that it assesses the types of emotionalreactions that we generally expect from members of various social groups Theywere informed of their right to discontinue participation at any time and for anyreason The experimenter then distributed the questionnaires explained the useof the scales and responded to any questions regarding the procedure To limitthe duration of the experiment to approximately 30 minutes so as to avoidfatigue each questionnaire contained only 8 or 12 of the 28 vignettes Thevignettes were arbitrarily divided into three sets for presentation to theparticipants those describing anger and disgust situations those for sadness andfear situations and finally those for guilt and shame situations For a third of theparticipants the four happiness vignettes were included in the set of situationsthey responded to

Data reduction and analyses The ratings for the four vignettes associatedwith each specific emotion were averaged All analyses were conducted on these

2The last two ratings served as distractors for this study and were not included in the analyses(see Eagly amp Mladinic 1989 for a similar approach)

614 HESS ET AL

means To assess differences in expected emotional reactions for men andwomen profile analyses were employed Profile analyses permit us to assesswhether emotion ratings varied as a function of the sex of the protagonist If menand women are perceived to react differently then the profiles will benonparallel If they are expected to react in a similar manner even thoughpossibly at different overall levels the profiles will be parallel Differences inthe overall level of emotional responding can be diagnosed by assessing whetherthe profiles are coincident

Results

Sex of rater The emotion expression profiles for male and femaleparticipants were compared for each of the seven emotion situations separatelyfor the rural and the urban sample and for menrsquos and womenrsquos expectedreactions The results from 26 of the resulting 28 profile analyses show that theprofiles are parallel and coincident That is male and female participantsrsquojudgements described the same emotion profiles with comparable levels for allemotions The data from male and female participants were therefore collapsedfor all further analyses

TABLE 1Number sex and location of participants as a

function of condition (Study 1)

Number of subjects

Condition Men Women Total

Anger-DisgustUrban 55 37 92Rural 31 58 89Total 86 95 181

Shame-GuiltUrban 35 56 91Rural 32 56 88Total 67 112 179

Sadness-FearUrban 55 43 98Rural 23 56 86Total 78 106 184

HappinessUrban 75 56 141Rural 45 87 132Total 120 143 263

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 615

Emotion profiles As expected distinct profiles emerged for each of theemotion themes (see Figures 1andashg) Further the profiles describing menrsquos andwomenrsquos perceived reactions were not parallel (see later) however the profileswere generally similar with regard to their major features As the focus of thepresent paper concerns sex differences we will restrict the discussion of theoverall form of the profiles to two general observations First the profiles for allnegative emotion situations show a prominent peak for the target emotion aswell as secondary peaks That is the perceived reactions to the emotional eventsused here typically involved both secondary emotions as well as a modalemotion It should be noted that an inspection of the raw data suggests that thepeaks for both modal and secondary emotions are reflected in the individualratings and are not an artefact of averaging over divergent ratings Put anotherway the derived lsquolsquoaveragersquorsquo profiles reflect those obtained from individualperceivers

As Figure 1 shows anger sadness and contempt were frequently expected toco-occur Further participants expected similar levels of shame and guilt forvignettes involving either of these specific emotions This suggests that thesetwo emotions were not well differentiated by the participants a finding that is inaccordance with the notion that in Western cultures shame and guilt are not asseparate as is the case in some other cultures (see eg Wallbott amp Scherer1994) Second the profile for the happiness-eliciting events was characterisedby the absence of any other expected emotion with the exception of a smallpercentage of occasions where serenity was also anticipated This suggests thathappiness was expected to occur as a relatively lsquolsquopurersquorsquo emotion However as acaveat one should note that only two positive emotions (happiness and serenity)were included in the list of possible emotional reactions and that serenity can beseen as a level of happiness rather than as an emotion distinct from it

Perceived sex differences To assess whether the profiles for menrsquos andwomenrsquos expected reactions to the different emotion eliciting situations wereparallel and coincident profile analyses were conducted on the mean ratings forthe four vignettes representing each emotion These analyses were conductedseparately for the rural and urban samples However the general findings for thetwo samples are identical and most post-hoc comparisons that reach significancein one sample do so in the other Therefore to facilitate the visual presentation ofthe data Figure 1 shows the data combined over the two samples However the F-values for the analyses are presented in Table 2 separately for the two samplesAll analyses and post-hoc tests were conducted with an alpha level of 05

For all emotion situations except shame and happiness profiles for menrsquos andwomenrsquos expected reactions were nonparallel for both samples (see Table 2)For shame vignettes the two profiles from the urban sample were parallelwhereas for happiness the profiles were parallel for both the urban and ruralgroups

616 HESS ET AL

(a)

(b)

Figure 1 Emotion profiles for menrsquos and womenrsquos expected emotional reaction as a function ofemotion theme (Study 1)

(Continued overleaf)

617

(c)

(d)

Figure 1 (Continued)

618

(e)

(f)

Figure 1 (Continued) (Continued overleaf)

619

In general the same differences between menrsquos and womenrsquos expectedemotional reactions were found for all negative emotion vignettes Regardless ofthe central emotion theme of the vignettes univariate post-hoc tests on theparticipantsrsquo ratings of expected anger happiness and serenity either revealedno differences in expected reactions between men and women or they revealedthat a higher percentage of men than women were expected to react with theseemotion displays Men were judged to be significantly more likely to expressanger in sadness anger shame and fear situations Further men were judged tobe significantly more likely than women to express happiness in guilt shameand sadness situations and to express serenity in guilt situations

On the other hand a different pattern emerged for participantsrsquo ratings ofexpected sadness fear disgust contempt shame and guilt For these emotionalreactions differences emerged for almost all negative emotion situations and inall cases women were expected to be more likely to react with these emotionsthan were men Specifically univariate post-hoc analyses revealed that womenwere judged to be significantly more likely to react with sadness fear and guiltin all emotion-relevant situations Further women were judged to besignificantly more likely to react with disgust and shame in all emotionsituations except for sadness situations Finally women were judged to besignificantly more likely than men to react with contempt in disgust guilt and

(g)

Figure 1 (Continued)

620 HESS ET AL

shame situations For happiness the profiles for both genders were parallel andcoincident suggesting that raters not only expected the same pattern of reactionsfrom men and women but also at the same level for each emotion

Discussion

In summary the analyses of the emotion profiles suggest the presence of clearexpectancies regarding not only the core emotion for a given type of situationbut also for the secondary emotional reactions that are expected in the situationAlthough the profiles for men and women are relatively similar with regard totheir major features a number of systematic differences in expectationsregarding menrsquos and womenrsquos emotional reactions emerged for the negativeemotion events but not for the positive

This latter finding is in contrast to the literature on the self-reportedfrequency of happiness expressionsexperiences in men and women (eg Allenamp Haccoun 1976) and with the finding that women are both believed and

TABLE 2Results of profile analyses on expected emotionalreactions for men and women in general (Study 1)

Vignettes F df p

AngerUrban 532 8175 001Rural 333 8169 001

DisgustUrban 507 8175 001Rural 461 8169 001

FearUrban 689 8187 001Rural 294 8163 004

SadnessUrban 489 8187 001Rural 267 8163 009

GuiltUrban 414 8173 001Rural 288 8167 005

ShameUrban 277 8173 007Rural 156 8167 140 (ns)

HappinessUrban 174 8273 090 (ns)Rural 127 8255 257 (ns)

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 621

observed to smile more than men (Briton amp Hall 1995) However given themultiple functions of smiles (see eg Fernandez-Dols amp Ruiz-Belda 1995Frank amp Ekman 1993 LaFrance amp Hecht 1995) differences in smiling may notreflect differences in happiness One explanation for this lack of continuity withthe existing literature is that the results of the present study are based on specificvignettes and not on global recollections Thus possible differences in real-world exposure to happiness-eliciting situations are less likely to influence ourfindings than they are to influence more global assessments

For all negative emotion events the profiles were nonparallel3 that is theratings revealed different expectations for men and women The differences areconsistent with the notion that the gender stereotype for emotional expressivenessdoes not assume women to be more expressive for all emotions For examplewomen are not expected to express more disgust and shame in sadness situationsthan are men Also women are expected to react with more contempt than aremen only in disgust guilt and shame situations while for all other situations nodifferences emerge However women are thought to express more sadness fearshame and guilt for all emotion-eliciting situations except for happiness eventsThat is regardless of the emotion theme prevalent in the vignettes women arealways expected to react with more sadness fear shame and guilt

An interesting case regards happiness as a secondary emotion in situationswith a negative core emotion The data reveal that men are typically expected toexperience more happiness in these situations than are women The differencesare strongest for guilt and shame vignettes which involve notions of cheatingand public misbehaviour and might reflect a difference in value structureinherent in the gender stereotype

In sum the results of Study 1 expand our knowledge regarding genderdifferences in emotion stereotypes by considering secondary emotionalresponses as well as modal emotional responses Specifically women are notonly expected to react with more sadness fear shame and guilt in situations forwhich these emotions are central but are expected to do so in all situationsinvolving negative affect Men on the other hand are expected to react withmore anger in a wide variety of situations involving negative affect as well aswith more happiness in some situations involving negative affect This suggeststhat the prevalent emotion stereotype describes womenrsquos predominant emotionalreactions to be more withdrawing (fear and sadness) and self-directed (shameand guilt) whereas menrsquos emotional reactions are seen as more active andaggressive

But to what degree are these general stereotypesexpectations reflected inthe self-perceptions that people have of their own emotional reactions AsJussim et alrsquos (1991) findings show self-perceptions can diverge from thecultural stereotypes Yet Jussim et al also suggest that over time these

3An exception are the shame profiles for the rural sample

622 HESS ET AL

stereotypical beliefs may act as a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy and moveself-perceptions in the direction of being consistent with the stereotype Alsoit is possible that widely held cultural beliefs become prescriptive and thuslead individuals to describe their own behaviour as being in accordance withthe stereotype Gallois (1994) in a review of emotion communication ininterpersonal situations concludes that emotion communication in suchsituations is highly rule-governed A similar perspective underlies Averillrsquos(1997) argument regarding the notion of emotion roles that have entrancerequirements such that for example a successful display of anger presupposessufficient power to adequately address the anger eliciting issue AlsoStoppard and Gruchy (1993) found that individuals anticipate costs andrewards for showing certain emotions in certain contexts Specifically womenexpect more costs when not expressing positive emotions in an lsquolsquootherrsquorsquo-oriented context whereas men expect rewards for showing positive emotionsregardless of context

Taken together these findings from diverse domains suggest that self-perceptions of emotional reactions should show a clear overlap withstereotypical expectations within any particular culture To the degree that weassume that these influences are due to recollection biases we may furtherspeculate that the overlap is less pronounced when asking about behaviouralreactions in particular social contexts than when asking for reactions inlsquolsquogeneralrsquorsquo or independent of a specific social situation Specifically as data onactual behaviour suggest relatively few sex differences in emotional behaviourwhereas the stereotype suggests a wide range of such differences differences inself-perceptions are more likely to be due to the influence of the culturalstereotypes than to actual behavioural differences between the genders Study 2is focused on an analysis of this possibility

STUDY 2

Study 1 confirmed that at least in the Quebec culture there are widely sharedbeliefs concerning how men and women differ in their emotion-relevantexpressive behaviour The central issue to be addressed in Study 2 therefore isthe degree of parallelism that exists between perceptions of how typical malesand females are perceived to respond to emotional events (Study 1) and self-perceptions of onersquos own emotional expressivity

To answer this question men and women drawn from the same population asin Study 1 were asked to indicate for each of the seven types of emotionsituations employed in Study 1 to what degree they expected to react themselveswith each of nine emotions if this event should happen to them In addition weasked participants to indicate the likelihood that they would show each of ninetypes of behaviours corresponding to the nine emotions of the emotion profileThese measures were embedded in a larger questionnaire that assessed beliefs

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 623

regarding emotional reactions of other social groups4 This placement made surethat the cultural beliefs and stereotypes held by the participants regardingemotional expressivity in general were evoked However the specific issue ofsex differences was not alluded to

Method

Participants A total of 360 students attending junior colleges in theMontreal urban region participated in the study Of these only thoseparticipants whose first language learned and still spoken was French whowere born in the province of Quebec (Canada) who had not lived outside ofQuebec for more than five consecutive years and who identified themselvesas either Canadian or Quebecois and not as a member of any other groupwere retained5 The resulting sample consisted of 289 individuals In total163 women and 126 men with a mean age of 1886 years participated ingroups of between 15 and 40 participants Of these 63 men and 85 womencompleted the emotion profiles and 63 men and 78 women completed thebehavioural reactions scale

Procedure Participants were informed of their right to discontinueparticipation at any time and for any reason The experimenter then distributedthe questionnaires The instructions as well as an example were provided on thefirst page The same instructions as employed in Study 1 were used the onlydifference being that participants were told to think about how they would reactand to indicate the likelihood in percent that they themselves would react witheach of the emotionsbehaviours indicated The same instructions were given forboth the emotion profile and the behavioural reactions scale with the onlydifference being that for the latter the word lsquolsquoemotionrsquorsquo was replaced withlsquolsquobehaviourrsquorsquo

Materials For each of seven emotions (happiness anger fear sadnessdisgust shame and guilt) two of the four vignettes employed in Study 1 wereretained Each participant responded to only one vignette for each emotion andvignettes were counterbalanced across participants

4 In the present context only data from the part of the questionnaire asking participants about howthey themselves would react in the described situation will be presented

5These selection criteria were included because the participants for Study 2 were recruited fromseveral Montreal junior colleges with an ethnically diverse population Emotion stereotypes are wellknown to differ between cultures (Kirouac amp Hess 1999) and the participants in Study 1 wererecruited from an ethnically homogenous population To ensure comparability between the twosamples it was therefore necessary to exclude participants from groups not present in the firstsample

624 HESS ET AL

Dependent measures

Emotion profiles These were computed in the same manner as in Study 1That is responses were averaged across the vignettes representing each specificemotion theme

Behavioural reactions scale This scale is intended to assess thebehavioural reactions that are expected for someone who is experiencing theemotional state in question To construct the scale a two-step procedure wasemployed

First 68 students of the University of Quebec at Montreal 54 women and 14men with a mean age of 279 years were asked to list for each of nineemotions (happiness serenity anger disgust fear contempt sadness shameand guilt) the behaviours and observable reactions they associate with eachspecific emotion The answers were compiled into frequency lists andsynonyms were grouped together The three most frequently namedbehaviours for each emotion were retained Due to overlap between someemotions this procedure yielded a list of 22 behaviours For the second step atotal of 44 participants 28 women and 16 men with a mean age of 226years were asked to rate for each behaviour and each of the nine emotionsthe likelihood of observing the behaviour in a person experiencing theemotion using a 7-point scale (1 very unlikely 7 very likely) Behavioursthat received a mean rating of 6 or above for only one emotion comprise thefinal scale

These consisted of the following items6 to laughto get excited (happiness)to trembleto freeze (fear) to hitto insultto criticise (anger) to cryto isolateoneself (sadness) to grimaceto vomit (disgust) to stareto look hard at(contempt) to smileto relaxto contemplate (serenity) to withdrawto loweronersquos headto blush (shame) to justify oneselfto apologise (guilt) On theprofile measure participants were asked to indicate the likelihood as apercentage that they would show each of the behaviours in a situation like theone described in the vignettes

Data analyses Each participant responded to one scenario for each of theseven emotions themes and used only one type of scale As in Study 1 thedata were collapsed over scenarios Because we had responses from morewomen than men for both dependent measures the data for the femaleparticipants were weighted to create equal cell sizes Profile analyses acrossthe nine emotional reactionsbehaviours were conducted to assess sexdifferences

6These items were translated from the original French by the authors

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 625

Results and discussion

As noted earlier the goal of Study 2 was to assess to what degree the self-perceptions of the men and women who participated in this study overlap withthe general stereotypes found in Study 1 To accomplish this the emotionprofiles from Study 1 were compared with the self-reported emotional profilesand with the behavioural reaction profiles collected here

Self-described emotion profiles The means and standard deviations for thenine scales of the emotion profiles for male and female participants arepresented in Table 3 A comparison of these means with those of the profilesfrom Study 1 reveals substantial similarities between the emotional reactionsexpected for oneself and those expected for men and women in general

Behavioral reactions Table 3 shows the means and standard deviations forthe nine behavioural reaction profiles These profiles represent the participantsself-report of the likelihood that they would display these specific behaviours inthe situations described by the vignettes As the focus of this paper is on sex

TABLE 3Means and standard deviations for self-perceptions of emotional reactionsbehaviours

for men and women (Study 2)

Men Women

Situation Mean SD Mean SD

AngerHappiness 262 1224 006 054Laughget excited 790 1826 429 1168Serenity 262 827 135 532Smilerelaxcontemplate 865 2068 435 1185Sadness 2359 2390 4405 3151Cryisolate oneself 935 2083 1825 2250Fear 603 1589 486 1070Tremblefreeze 332 814 630 1155Anger 6268 2873 6076 2928Hitinsultcriticise 3540 3042 2654 2873Disgust 1175 2447 1094 1997Grimacevomit 194 553 286 854Contempt 1865 2505 2102 2543Starelook hard at 2065 2718 1156 2216Shame 286 827 802 1887Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 1044 2187 1038 1642Guilt 349 826 491 1582Justify oneselfapologise 2045 3072 1761 2663

(Continued)

626 HESS ET AL

TABLE 3(Continued)

Men Women

Situation Mean SD Mean SD

DisgustHappiness 611 1714 143 575Laughget excited 1989 2669 915 1825Serenity 611 1855 208 1159Smilerelaxcontemplate 1159t 2113 578 1482Sadness 516 1537 490 1531Cryisolate oneself 073 403 346 1352Fear 373t 1066 911 2018Tremblefreeze 476t 1154 1015 1977Anger 1359 2146 1437 2521Hitinsultcriticise 1214 2210 1186 2151Disgust 5086 3257 5881 3178Grimacevomit 1167 2121 1692 2236Contempt 1798 2226 1750 2706Starelook hard at 1991 2362 1686 2363Shame 1023 1972 1683 2738Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 645 1663 1169 2337Guilt 262 937 119 378Justify oneselfapologise 992 2511 744 1924

SadnessHappiness 317 1280 412 1594Laughget excited 123 789 128 114Serenity 887t 2017 318 1456Smilerelaxcontemplate 621 1848 346 1196Sadness 7690 2816 8251 2258Cryisolate oneself 6008 3131 6736 3059Fear 849t 1820 1546 2637Tremblefreeze 1595 2763 1135 2068Anger 1825 2641 2261 2919Hitinsultcriticise 532 1399 641 1517Disgust 651t 2015 176 940Grimacevomit 790 2017 353 1318Contempt 659 2125 332 1121Starelook hard at 000 000 045 397Shame 214 1050 141 711Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 2008 2916 724 1680Guilt 1524 2494 2141 2985Justify oneselfapologise 315 1065 391 1478

FearHappiness 317 1487 006 054Laughget excited 203 1054 058 361Serenity 587 1698 082 327

(Continued overleaf)

627

TABLE 3(Continued)

Men Women

Situation Mean SD Mean SD

Smilerelaxcontemplate 1048 2243 182 666Sadness 2333 3051 2929 3588Cryisolate oneself 1306 2536 3022 3582Fear 5111 3207 7535 2715Tremblefreeze 2008 2565 3378 3378Anger 2468 3297 1954 2949Hitinsultcriticise 1222 2098 446 1410Disgust 787 1808 1006 2206Grimacevomit 429 1270 365 1115Contempt 1192 2216 1141 2078Starelook hard at 677 1822 391 1405Shame 143 470 200 615Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 1606 2579 1000 2117Guilt 794 2199 369 995Justify oneselfapologise 282 1263 276 1319

ShameHappiness 452 1596 144 1039Laughget excited 1825 2905 1387 1990Serenity 444 1492 182 1028Smilerelaxcontemplate 1206t 2333 623 1262Sadness 1151 2121 2077 2361Cryisolate oneself 334 877 426 1107Fear 1246 2431 1135 1700Tremblefreeze 776 1569 894 1491Anger 1262 2259 1432 2408Hitinsultcriticise 565 1478 314 1140Disgust 206 966 347 1244Grimacevomit 202 590 231 1086Contempt 730 1532 811 1880Starelook hard at 347 833 304 1160Shame 4819 3534 5968 2948Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 2563 2974 2885 2908Guilt 3095 3442 4788 3282Justify oneselfapologise 4379 3144 4256 3074

GuiltHappiness 1024 2432 355 1189Laughget excited 734 2259 584 1761Serenity 262 1008 223 771Smilerelaxcontemplate 645 1692 416 1409Sadness 2003t 2705 2971 3390Cryisolate oneself 960 1992 2273 2979Fear 1778 2667 2653 3305

(Continued)

628

differences we will not discuss these data in detail However two things arenoteworthy First both men and women report lower probabilities that theywould react with a certain behaviour for example lsquolsquoto laughto get excitedrsquorsquothan with the emotion that corresponds to the behaviour (happiness) Thisfinding is not unexpected as individuals do not always express their emotionsoutwardly or may have developed idiosyncratic means of expressing certainemotions Second the profile data for the behaviours resemble strongly theemotional reactions reported For example for anger the highest means arefound for to hitto insultto criticise for to cryto isolate one self and for to stare

TABLE 3(Continued)

Men Women

Situation Mean SD Mean SD

Tremblefreeze 1206 2212 1227 2024Anger 1762 2980 1926 2950Hitinsultcriticise 129 543 221 720Disgust 1248 2569 1152 2402Grimacevomit 581 1642 351 1385Contempt 1603 2857 1464 2611Starelook hard at 129 495 136 485Shame 2667 3227 5375 3467Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 1952 2472 1769 2333Guilt 5071 3885 5753 3372Justify oneselfapologise 4484 3581 4286 3608

HappinessHappiness 8913 1981 9106 1471Laughget excited 5763 3420 6069 3283Serenity 2738t 3650 3906 3797Smilerelaxcontemplate 5451 3445 4647 3432Sadness 127 946 020 123Cryisolate oneself 040 318 029 141Fear 103 372 206 680Tremblefreeze 419t 1313 090 057Anger 032 252 000 000Hitinsultcriticise 000 000 013 114Disgust 048 378 000 000Grimacevomit 000 000 000 000Contempt 081 522 000 000Starelook hard at 355 1392 147 388Shame 111 764 000 000Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 718 1905 687 1859Guilt 270 1526 000 000Justify oneselfapologise 355 1535 090 340

Note Significant differences between men and women tp lt 1 p lt 05 p lt 01 p lt 001

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 629

to look hard at which correspond to anger sadness and contempt reactionsrespectively

However a number of differences between these two types of profiles canalso be observed For example for the emotional reaction profiles for anger andsadness the second highest mean is found for guilt whereas for the behaviouralreaction profiles for these emotions the second highest mean is found for shamebehaviours (to withdrawto lower onersquos headto blush) This findings may be dueto the general confusion between shame and guilt that has been observed forWestern cultures (see eg Wallbott amp Scherer 1994)

Sex differences To assess whether male and female participants differedwith regard to their expected emotional reactions and behaviours in the differentemotion eliciting situations profile analyses were conducted on the ratings foreach emotion situation All analyses and post-hoc tests were conducted at analpha level of 05 The results are shown in Table 4

TABLE 4Results of profile analyses on self-reported likelihood

of emotional reactionsbehaviours for men andwomen (Study 2)

Vignettes F df p

AngerReactions 295 8116 005Behaviours 183 8113 079

DisgustReactions 169 8115 107Behaviours 173 8116 099

FearReactions 330 8116 002Behaviours 390 8116 001

SadnessReactions 207 8116 044Behaviours 170 8115 105

GuiltReactions 186 8117 071Behaviours 130 8115 251

ShameReactions 215 8116 037Behaviours 70 8116 689

HappinessReactions 106 8116 397Behaviours 109 8116 376

630 HESS ET AL

Emotional reactions For all emotion situations except disgust andhappiness the emotional reactions profiles were nonparallel or marginallynonparallel (see Table 4) For the nonparallel profiles post-hoc tests revealedthat a similar pattern of sex differences emerged across the different emotionthemes For happiness and serenity there were either no significant differencesbetween men and women or men reported experiencing these emotions with ahigher probability than did women Conversely for sadness fear shame andguilt there were either no significant sex differences or women reported feelingthese emotions with a higher probability than did men For anger disgust andcontempt reactions no significant differences emerged

Emotional behaviour profiles Only the fear profile was significantlynonparallel (different) for men and women The profiles for anger and disgustwere marginally nonparallel and the remaining profiles were all parallel andcoincident Thus fewer significant differences between menrsquos and womenrsquosexpected behaviours in the situations described by the vignettes were found thanwas the case for the expected emotional reactions in Studies 1 and 2 Yet it isimportant to note that the probabilities reported for the behavioural profiles werelower overall and it is thus possible that this lack of differences is due to a lackof sensitivity of the measure

As postulated based on previous research (eg Crawford Clippax OnyxGault amp Benton 1992) as well as on the emotional reactions profile womenreport a higher probability of either crying or isolating oneself in an angersituation than do men Conversely and in accordance with both the literature onanger expression (see earlier) and the results from the emotional reactionsprofile men report it more likely to hitto insultto criticise than women thoughthis difference is not significant In addition they report that they aresignificantly more likely to stareto look hard (contempt) than do women abehaviour that could also be interpreted as aggressive when shown in responseto an insult

As regards the disgust situations men report that they are more likely tolaughto get excited This sex difference matches the finding for the emotionalreactions profile but was not found in Study 1 Finally for the fear situation menreport that they are more likely to hitto insultto criticise as well as to smiletorelaxto contemplate (serenity) than do women The emotional reactions profilefor fear from this study shows that men report a higher probability of reactingwith serenity but not with anger than do women As these behaviourscorrespond to a macho or cool demeanour in a threatening situation they fit thegeneral stereotype of masculine behaviour Conversely women report to bemore likely to trembleto freeze as well as to cryto isolate one self in fearsituations

In sum although many fewer sex differences reached significance whencomparing self-reported expected behaviours for men and women the pattern of

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 631

results is largely congruent with previous findings Specifically women reporteda higher probability of showing behaviours congruent with sadness and fear thandid men whereas men reported higher probabilities for anger and serenebehaviours In addition men reported a higher probability of showing acontempt behaviour in an anger situation yet the relevant behaviour (to staretolook hard) could be interpreted as aggressive in that context

How congruent are the findings fromStudies 1 and 2

As mentioned earlier not all significant differences found in Study 1 for theexpected reactions for men and women in general were also found for self-reports of expected reactions by men and women for themselves Yet as theresults for the two studies are based on different degrees of freedomsignificance levels cannot be directly compared To assess whether stereotypicaland self-reported sex differences were of similar magnitude we computed theeffect sizes for both studies Table 5 shows Cohenrsquos d for the post-hoc

TABLE 5Cohenrsquos d for sex differences in Studies 1 and 2

Study 1 Study 2

SituationEmotionalreactions

Emotionalreactions

Emotionalbehaviours

AngerHappiness 7023Serenity 7025Sadness 203 073 041Fear 123 030Anger 7055 7030Disgust 068Contempt 7026Shame 117 7035Guilt 129

DisgustHappiness 7032 7037 7047Serenity 7045 7026 7021Sadness 095 027Fear 189 033 033AngerDisgust 160 024 024Contempt 050Shame 062 7028 026Guilt 062 020

(Continued)

632 HESS ET AL

TABLE 5(Continued)

Study 1 Study 2

SituationEmotionalreactions

Emotionalreactions

Emotionalbehaviours

SadnessHappiness 7053Serenity 7032Sadness 184 022 024Fear 171 031Anger 7065 042Disgust 7030 7025Contempt 021Shame 020 7046 054Guilt 176 022 7033

FearHappiness 7021 7030Serenity 7026 7041 7052Sadness 189 055Fear 221 082 046Anger 7084 7043Disgust 067ContemptShame 049 7026Guilt 172 7025

ShameHappiness 7045 7023Serenity 7027 7020 7031Sadness 175 041Fear 128Anger 7069Disgust 065Contempt 054Shame 154 035Guilt 153 050

GuiltHappiness 7107 7035Serenity 7051Sadness 198 032 051Fear 162 029AngerDisgust 128Contempt 075Shame 178 051Guilt 183 020

633

comparisons for each emotion in the profile for the six negative emotionsituations across the two studies For Study 1 the effect sizes for the urban andthe rural sample were combined To facilitate the reading of the table onlydifferences for which d was at least 020 (ie equivalent to a small effect) areshown In general effect sizes for Study 1 are larger than those for Study 2 Foremotional reactions the expected differences between men and women were ofmedium (gt 050) to large (gt 080) size whereas for self-perceptions the expecteddifferences between men and women were small to medium in size

The most stable sex difference across the two studies was found for sadnessboth as a core emotion in sadness vignettes and as a secondary emotion That isfor all negative emotions the general stereotype describes women as reactingwith more sadness and women also perceive themselves as reacting with moresadness andor report more sadness behaviours Further women are expected toreact with (and they self-report) more shame and guilt reactionsbehaviours inshame and guilt situations However for the other negative emotions (angerdisgust sadness and fear) men report higher levels of shame reactions or shamebehaviours (but not both) Finally fear reactions and behaviours are described asmore likely for women in general and women perceive themselves as reactingwith more fear in disgust sadness fear and guilt situations

Another very stable sex difference across studies regards happiness andserenity reactions for negative emotion vignettes Men consistently are bothexpected to react with and self-report more happiness reactions as well ashappiness behaviours for disgust fear and shame vignettes To a lesser degreethis pattern also emerges for sadness and guilt vignettes As mentioned in thediscussion of Study 1 this may reflect differences in the value structure betweenmen and women

In sum a comparison of effect sizes shows considerable consistency acrossthe two studies Specifically noteworthy is the very consistent finding for boththe stereotypical beliefs and the self-reports with regard to sadness reactionswhich are considered as more likely for women than for men for all negativeemotion situations studied

However a number of differences between the general stereotypes and theself-perceptions also emerged specifically with regard to shame reactionsWhereas women are generally believed to be more likely to react with shameto negative emotion events the self-reported likelihood for shame as aconcomitant emotion is higher for men for all situations except for guilt(given the general confusion regarding these states observed in Westerncultures this may be due to shame being a core rather than a concomitantemotion for guilt scenarios) Yet self-reported shame behaviours are morelikely for women than for men in sadness and disgust situations A possibleexplanation is that men are actively trying to not show shame reactionsmdashtoconform to the general stereotypemdashbut are aware that they nonetheless arelikely to feel shame in those situations

634 HESS ET AL

To conclude the general stereotype and self-perceptions of emotionalreactions and behaviours suggest that women react with more sadness to all typesof negative emotion events Further the stereotypes and the self-perceptions arein agreement on menrsquos greater likelihood to react with happiness and serenity to avariety of negative emotions In contrast differences between the generalstereotypes and self-perceptions emerge for shame reactions with men reportingin situations when shame is a secondary emotion a higher likelihood of shamereactions but not necessarily shame behaviours than do women

STUDY 3

The results from Study 2 suggest that the stereotypical beliefs regarding menrsquosand womenrsquos emotional reactions and behaviours in a variety of emotion-inducing situations converge with self-perceptions of menrsquos and womenrsquosemotional reactions and behaviours in those same situations This finding isconsistent with the notion that autobiographic statements that requireparticipants to summarise over a number of related experiences may be biasedby stereotypical expectations (see eg Feldman-Barrett et al 1998) This leadsto the question of whether a similar overlap can also be found for narratives ofsingle specific emotional events from the participantsrsquo past If stereotypesindeed influence the way emotional events are reconstructed in a narrative wewould expect to find that women report more sadness events and express moresadness overall as well as more intense target emotions for all but anger eventsConversely we would expect men to report more situations involving anger aswell as experiencing more happiness and serenity overall

However as Study 3 is based on personal narratives and not on standardisedvignettes such a finding could simply be due to the fact that the emotionantecedent events in a real-life setting differ for men and women To assess thispossibility we decided to measure the emotion antecedent events by means of anappraisal questionnaire that assesses the participantsrsquo perception of the emotionantecedent situation To the degree that perceptions of emotion antecedents aresimilar for men and women while reported emotional reactions differ we canconclude that observed sex differences are not due to differences in theperception of the event per se For example if womenrsquos tendency to report moresadness were due to a difference in the perception of the emotion antecedentsituation we would expect women to report more often that they did not feel thatthey could do anything to change the situation or that they had to adapt to thesituation (as sadness is generally associated with the notion of irrevocable loss)

Overview

For this study we translated and adapted a questionnaire reported by Scherer(1988) that consists of two parts The first part invites the participants todescribe an event during which they experienced an emotion The second part

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 635

asks specific questions regarding the appraisal process We added a section inwhich we asked participants to complete an emotion profile for the event Toavoid the possibility that men and women would relate narratives from widelydifferent types of situations we asked participants to describe an event related tofamily interactions This class of situations should be readily accessible to allparticipants and ensure that emotional events involving human interactionpartners were reported

Allowing participants to choose the type of emotional events they report hasseveral advantages Most importantly we can assess what type of emotionalevents men and women choose to report spontaneously It also permitsparticipants to choose a salient event for which they can recollect theinformation necessary to respond to the appraisal questions On the other handthis approach is unlikely to result in a well-balanced distribution of emotiontopics thus making it difficult or impossible to analyse the data separately fordifferent emotion themes Yet in the context of the present study we were onlyinterested in sex differences in reports and not in absolute levels of responsesStudies 1 and 2 suggest that sex differences are very stable across all negativeemotions We therefore decided to allow participants to choose the emotiontheme and analysed the data collapsed across all negative emotion themes

Method

Participants A total of 171 students 87 men and 84 women with a meanage of 1862 years participated in this study Most of the participants (147) wererecruited from an ethnically homogenous junior college in the larger Montrealurban area (Cegep Lionel-Groulx Ste-Therese Quebec Canada) and partici-pated in groups An additional 24 participants were recruited individually

Procedure The experimenter explained that the study concerned emotionalevents in peoplersquos lives Participants were informed of their right to discontinueparticipation at any time and for any reason The experimenter then distributedthe questionnaires and responded to questions regarding the procedure The tasktook between 10 and 30 minutes Most of this time difference can be attributedto the amount of detail provided in the event description that ranged from acouple of words (eg birth of my daughter) to well over a page

Dependent measures The questionnaire consisted of four parts The firstpart was an open-ended question asking the participants to describe any eventinvolving their family life that led them to experience an emotion Sadnessshame anger guilt joy fear and disgust were provided as examples ofemotions Participants were asked to give a detailed description of the situationincluding the events that led up to it their reactions and those of others presentIn addition they were asked to identify the people involved with respect to their

636 HESS ET AL

relationship with them (eg my partner my sister etc) as well as to identify themain emotion theme of the story This served to ensure that the participantsbased their answers to the following questions on a specific event and not on aclass of similar events

Emotion description The second part of the questionnaire consisted ofquestions regarding when the event happened for how long they felt theemotion and the intensity of the core emotion identified as the emotion theme ofthe story Participants were also asked to indicate whether they tried to hide orcontrol their feelings and to what degree This part also contained the emotionprofile used in Studies 1 and 2 Using this measure participants were asked toindicate to what percentage they had felt each of the nine emotions from theprofile

Appraisal questionnaire A series of questions regarding the appraisal processwere used to assess the emotion antecedent events These questions weretranslated from the questionnaire reported by Scherer (1988) Specificallyparticipants were asked to what degree they had expected the situation to occurhow pleasant or unpleasant they considered the event whether the event helpedor hindered them in achieving their aims to what degree they considered that thesituation or the event that caused the emotion was unjust or unfair whether theevent was caused by their own or by someone elsersquos behaviour to what degreethey considered that the behaviour that caused the event would be judged asimproper or immoral by their acquaintances how the event affected theirfeelings about themselves such as their self-esteem or self-confidence andfinally to what degree the event changed their relationships with the peopleinvolved (all on negative-positive 7-point bipolar scales)

In addition participants were given a list of 11 specific potential causes of theevent (caused it myself natural causes act of god etc) They also evaluatedtheir ability to act upon or to cope with the event and its consequences using ascale involving 5 options The last part of the questionnaire consisted ofquestions regarding the participantsrsquo sex their age and whether they werecurrently seeing someone in a love-based relationship and if so for how long

Results

Of the 171 reported emotion events 147 (74 reported by men and 73 reported bywomen) concerned negative emotional events Of these a total of 62 weresadness events 22 were anger events and 11 were guilt events The remainingevents were distributed over a large number of negative emotions

As expected the very low frequency of reports for specific emotion themesmade separate analyses of reports of these events unfeasible We thereforedecided to perform analyses on the data summed over all negative emotionthemes The 24 events with positive emotion themes were obviously excludedfrom these analyses

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 637

Do women report more sadness events and men more anger events Toaddress this question a chi-square test was performed on the frequency withwhich men and women labeled the reported event as a sad versus an anger eventIn line with the results of Studies 1 and 2 we found men to report more angerevents and women to report more sadness events Specifically 14 men and 8women reported anger events and 25 men and 37 women reported sad events w2

= 355 p = 06 d = 42Do women report more intense core emotions than men For the intensity of

the core emotion experienced during the event women reported significantlyhigher levels (M = 593 SD = 101) than men (M = 554 SD = 123) t(145) =222 p = 028 d = 37

Do women and men report different levels of negative emotions across theemotion profile Figure 2 presents the emotion profiles separately for men andwomen An inspection of the profiles shows that overall men report morehappinessserenity whereas women report higher levels of all other emotionsThe profiles are nonparallel F(8 137) = 5877 p lt 001 Post-hoc analysesrevealed a significant sex difference in self-reported sadness with womenreporting higher levels than men To compare the sex differences in the profiles

Figure 2 Emotion profile for menrsquos and womenrsquos self-reported emotional reactions to negativeemotion events (Study 3)

638 HESS ET AL

found in this study with those from Studies 1 and 2 effect sizes were calculatedUsing the same cut-off point as previously (small effect size d = 020) only twodifferences were found to be stable across the three studies Men report higherlevels of happiness for negative emotion events (d = 7022) and women reporthigher levels of sadness (d = 043) As the latter difference may be due to thehigher frequency of reported sadness events by women we also verified whetherwomen report higher levels of sadness when sadness events are excluded fromthe analysis An inspection of the means revealed a marginally significantdifference in the same direction M = 6472 SD = 3247 and M = 5108 SD =3684 for women and men respectively t(83) = 181 p = 074 d = 40

Are there differences in appraisal patterns between men and women Asmentioned earlier the reported differences in emotional reactions could be dueto differences in the perception of the emotion antecedent events Yet nodifferences in appraisal patterns were found suggesting that emotion antecedentevents were perceived similarly In addition despite the more frequent and moreintense reports of sadness women did not report different coping styles thanmen and did not seem to feel more helpless (38 men vs 34 women report thisreaction) In fact women more frequently report that they felt able to lsquolsquoinfluencethe situation positivelyrsquorsquo (19 women vs 9 men report this reaction though thedifference is not significant)

Discussion

Study 3 extended the study of emotion stereotypes and self-perceptions based onvignettes to narratives of emotional events that the participants had in factexperienced themselves The goal of the study was to investigate whether thefindings from Studies 1 and 2 generalise to such recollections of personal eventsThe results strongly suggest this to be the case Women again report higherlevels of sadness for negative emotion events They also report more sad eventsin general Men on the other hand report more anger events as well as morehappiness for negative emotion events as was found in both Studies 1 and 2 Yetno reported differences in appraisal or coping emerged This suggests that theobserved differences in emotional reactions are not due to a bias in the appraisalprocess nor to an inability to act upon the event

If emotion antecedents do not differ why are differences in emotionalreactions reported We suggest that such differences represent an influence ofthe general emotion stereotype on the narrative reconstruction of a personalevent This conclusion is based on the observation of a null effect and thus opento the critique that the present study lacked the power necessary to detect realdifferences in appraisal between men and women To assess this critique wecalculated the absolute mean effect size for the interval-scaled appraisalquestions to be d = 015 To achieve 80 power a sample of 1100 participantswould be needed These data underscore the very slim differences in appraisals

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 639

between men and women making it highly unlikely that the effects observed inthis study are mediated by a difference in appraisal and thus by a difference inthe perception of the underlying event

CONCLUSIONS

The present series of studies had the goal to assess general emotion stereotypesand their influence on self-perceptions of emotional reactions by men andwomen We wanted to both describe these stereotypes in more detail with regardnot only to the modal emotion for a specific event (such as sadness reactions to aloss) but also with regard to the secondary emotions present in these situationsFurther we wanted to assess to what degree such expectations for men andwomen in general are endorsed by individuals for themselves as well as whetherthey would be spontaneously reported when relating a personally experiencedevent

Two gender differences were found to be stable across all three experimentalparadigms Women are expected to be more likely to react with sadness in allnegative emotion situations they expect themselves to be more likely to reactwith sadness as well as to cry and to withdraw more and finally women reportmore sadness in personal events In contrast men are expected to react withmore happinessserenity during negative emotional situations they expectthemselves to react more frequently this way as well as to laugh and smile moreand to be more relaxed They also tend to report more happiness whendescribing negative personal events

Not all general emotion stereotypes were found in the self-perceptionsstudied in Studies 2 and 3 Specifically according to Study 1 women areexpected to be more likely to react with shame and guilt in all negative emotionsituations Yet women did not expect to do so for themselves in situations otherthan shame and guilt situations and in fact men reported to be more likely toreact with shame in a variety of situations Further men and women did notreport any differences with regard to experiences of shame and guilt during thepersonal events

Study 3 included an appraisal questionnaire to address the question whetherthe self-reported differences in emotionality between men and women are due todifferences in the appraisal of the emotion antecedent events or rather to theinfluence of the prevalent norms No differences in appraisals were detectedsuggesting that the self-reported differences may be due to the normative forcesof the general stereotype rather than to appraisal differences

It may be argued that the Study 3 is based on recollections of past events andthat self-reports of emotional experiences represent after the fact reconstructionsthat differ from the actually experienced emotions during the event (seeParkinson amp Manstead 1993) A related argument may be made for Study 2where participants had to estimate the likelihood of their emotional reactions to

640 HESS ET AL

hypothetical events (even though the latter were chosen to be common everydayevents) This may well be true Yet the question remains why did men andwomen reconstruct the events differently in terms of their emotional reactionsThe answer would then be that the prevalent emotion stereotype which islargely endorsed by the population studied influenced this reconstruction Yetas peoplesrsquo sense of self depends on their past histories this would imply thatreconstructions of emotional events in line with emotion stereotypes mayeventually lead individuals to conform more closely to these stereotypes as theybecome more and more part of their emotional history and eventually of theiremotional self

Manuscript received 30 May 1997Revised manuscript received 23 February 2000

REFERENCES

Adams S Kuebli J Boyle PA amp Fivush R (1995) Gender differences in parent-childconversations about past emotions A longitudinal investigation Sex Roles 33 309ndash323

Allen JG amp Haccoun DM (1976) Sex differences in emotionality A multidimensional approachHuman Relations 29 711ndash722

Averill JR (1997) The emotions An integrative approach In R Hogan JA Johnson amp SRBriggs (Eds) Handbook of personality psychology (pp 513ndash541) San Diego CA AcademicPress

Birnbaum DW (1983) Preschoolersrsquo stereotypes about sex differences in emotionality Areaffirmation Journal of Genetic Psychology 143 139ndash140

Briton NJ amp Hall JA (1995) Gender-based expectancies and observer judgements of smilingJournal of Nonverbal Behavior 19 49ndash65

Brody LR amp Hall JA (1993) Gender and emotion In M Lewis amp JM Haviland (Eds)Handbook of emotions (pp 447-460) New York Guilford Press

Crawford J Clippax S Onyx J Gault U amp Benton P (1992) Emotion and genderConstructing meaning from memory London Sage

Dunn J Bretherton I amp Munn P (1987) Conversations about feeling states between mothers andtheir children Developmental Psychology 23 132ndash139

Eagly AH amp Mladinic A (1989) Gender stereotypes and attitudes toward women and menPersonality and Social Psychology Bulletin 15 543ndash558

Ekman P amp Friesen W (1986) A new pan-cultural facial expression of emotion Motivation andEmotion 10 159ndash168

Feldman-Barrett L Robin L Pietromonaco PR amp Eysell KM (1998) Are women the moreemotional sex Evidence from emotional experiences in social context Cognition and Emotion12 555ndash578

Fernandez-Dols J-M amp Ruiz-Belda M-A (1995) Are smiles a sign of happiness Gold medalwinners at the Olympic Games Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 69 1113ndash1119

Fischer A (1993) Sex differences in emotionality Fact or stereotype Feminism and Psychology 3303ndash318

Fivush R (1989) Exploring differences in the emotional content of mother child conversationsabout the past Sex Roles 20 675ndash691

Frank MG amp Ekman P (1993) Not all smiles are created equal The differences betweenenjoyment and nonenjoymen t smiles [Special Issue Current issues in psychological humorresearch] Humor International Journal of Humor Research 6 9ndash26

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 641

Gallois C (1994) Group membership social rules and power A social psychologica l perspectiveon emotional communication Journal of Pragmatics 22 301ndash324

Hall JA (1984) Nonverbal sex differences Communication accuracy and expressive styleBaltimore MD Johns Hopkins University Press

Izard C (1972) Patterns of emotions A new analysis of anxiety and depression New YorkAcademic Press

Jussim L Milbourn M amp Nelson W (1991) Emotional openness Sex-role stereotypes and self-perceptions Representative Research in Social Psychology 19 35ndash52

Kirouac G amp Hess U (1999) Group membership and the decoding of nonverbal behavior In PPhilippot R Feldman amp E Coats (Eds) The social context of nonverbal behavior (pp 182ndash210) New York Cambridge University Press

Kring AM amp Gordon AH (1998) Sex differences in emotion Expression experience andphysiology Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74 686ndash703

LaFrance M amp Banaji M (1992) Toward a reconsideration of the gender-emotion relationship InMS Clark (Ed) Emotion and social behavior Review of personality and social psychology(Vol 14 pp 178ndash201) Newbury Park CA Sage

LaFrance M amp Hecht MA (1995) Why smiles generate leniency Personality and SocialPsychology Bulletin 21 207ndash214

Lazarus RS (1991) Emotion and adaptation Oxford UK Oxford University PressParkinson B amp Manstead ASR (1993) Making sense of emotion in stories and social life

Cognition and Emotion 7 295ndash323Plutchik R (1980) Emotion A psychoevolutionar y synthesis New York Harper amp RowRime B Mesquita B Philippot P amp Boca S (1991) Beyond the emotional event Six studies on

the social sharing of emotion Cognition and Emotion 5 435ndash465Scherer KR (1988) Appendix C Questionnaire used in the International Survey on Emotion

Antecedents and Reactions (ISEAR) In KR Scherer (Ed) Facets of emotion Recent researchHillsdale NJ Erlbaum

Sherman JW amp Bessenhoff GR (1999) Stereotypes as source monitoring cues On theinteraction between episodic and semantic memory Psychological Science 10 106ndash110

Stoppard JM amp Gruchy CD (1993) Gender context and expression of positive emotionPersonality and Social Psychology Bulletin 19 143ndash150

Tucker JS amp Riggio RE (1988) The role of social skills in encoding posed and spontaneousfacial expressions Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 12 87ndash97

Wallbott HG amp Scherer KR (1994) Cultural determinants in experiencing shame and guilt InJune Price Tangney amp Kurt W Fischer (Eds) Self conscious emotions The psychology of shameand guilt embarrasment and pride (pp 465ndash487) New York Guilford Press

642 HESS ET AL

means To assess differences in expected emotional reactions for men andwomen profile analyses were employed Profile analyses permit us to assesswhether emotion ratings varied as a function of the sex of the protagonist If menand women are perceived to react differently then the profiles will benonparallel If they are expected to react in a similar manner even thoughpossibly at different overall levels the profiles will be parallel Differences inthe overall level of emotional responding can be diagnosed by assessing whetherthe profiles are coincident

Results

Sex of rater The emotion expression profiles for male and femaleparticipants were compared for each of the seven emotion situations separatelyfor the rural and the urban sample and for menrsquos and womenrsquos expectedreactions The results from 26 of the resulting 28 profile analyses show that theprofiles are parallel and coincident That is male and female participantsrsquojudgements described the same emotion profiles with comparable levels for allemotions The data from male and female participants were therefore collapsedfor all further analyses

TABLE 1Number sex and location of participants as a

function of condition (Study 1)

Number of subjects

Condition Men Women Total

Anger-DisgustUrban 55 37 92Rural 31 58 89Total 86 95 181

Shame-GuiltUrban 35 56 91Rural 32 56 88Total 67 112 179

Sadness-FearUrban 55 43 98Rural 23 56 86Total 78 106 184

HappinessUrban 75 56 141Rural 45 87 132Total 120 143 263

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 615

Emotion profiles As expected distinct profiles emerged for each of theemotion themes (see Figures 1andashg) Further the profiles describing menrsquos andwomenrsquos perceived reactions were not parallel (see later) however the profileswere generally similar with regard to their major features As the focus of thepresent paper concerns sex differences we will restrict the discussion of theoverall form of the profiles to two general observations First the profiles for allnegative emotion situations show a prominent peak for the target emotion aswell as secondary peaks That is the perceived reactions to the emotional eventsused here typically involved both secondary emotions as well as a modalemotion It should be noted that an inspection of the raw data suggests that thepeaks for both modal and secondary emotions are reflected in the individualratings and are not an artefact of averaging over divergent ratings Put anotherway the derived lsquolsquoaveragersquorsquo profiles reflect those obtained from individualperceivers

As Figure 1 shows anger sadness and contempt were frequently expected toco-occur Further participants expected similar levels of shame and guilt forvignettes involving either of these specific emotions This suggests that thesetwo emotions were not well differentiated by the participants a finding that is inaccordance with the notion that in Western cultures shame and guilt are not asseparate as is the case in some other cultures (see eg Wallbott amp Scherer1994) Second the profile for the happiness-eliciting events was characterisedby the absence of any other expected emotion with the exception of a smallpercentage of occasions where serenity was also anticipated This suggests thathappiness was expected to occur as a relatively lsquolsquopurersquorsquo emotion However as acaveat one should note that only two positive emotions (happiness and serenity)were included in the list of possible emotional reactions and that serenity can beseen as a level of happiness rather than as an emotion distinct from it

Perceived sex differences To assess whether the profiles for menrsquos andwomenrsquos expected reactions to the different emotion eliciting situations wereparallel and coincident profile analyses were conducted on the mean ratings forthe four vignettes representing each emotion These analyses were conductedseparately for the rural and urban samples However the general findings for thetwo samples are identical and most post-hoc comparisons that reach significancein one sample do so in the other Therefore to facilitate the visual presentation ofthe data Figure 1 shows the data combined over the two samples However the F-values for the analyses are presented in Table 2 separately for the two samplesAll analyses and post-hoc tests were conducted with an alpha level of 05

For all emotion situations except shame and happiness profiles for menrsquos andwomenrsquos expected reactions were nonparallel for both samples (see Table 2)For shame vignettes the two profiles from the urban sample were parallelwhereas for happiness the profiles were parallel for both the urban and ruralgroups

616 HESS ET AL

(a)

(b)

Figure 1 Emotion profiles for menrsquos and womenrsquos expected emotional reaction as a function ofemotion theme (Study 1)

(Continued overleaf)

617

(c)

(d)

Figure 1 (Continued)

618

(e)

(f)

Figure 1 (Continued) (Continued overleaf)

619

In general the same differences between menrsquos and womenrsquos expectedemotional reactions were found for all negative emotion vignettes Regardless ofthe central emotion theme of the vignettes univariate post-hoc tests on theparticipantsrsquo ratings of expected anger happiness and serenity either revealedno differences in expected reactions between men and women or they revealedthat a higher percentage of men than women were expected to react with theseemotion displays Men were judged to be significantly more likely to expressanger in sadness anger shame and fear situations Further men were judged tobe significantly more likely than women to express happiness in guilt shameand sadness situations and to express serenity in guilt situations

On the other hand a different pattern emerged for participantsrsquo ratings ofexpected sadness fear disgust contempt shame and guilt For these emotionalreactions differences emerged for almost all negative emotion situations and inall cases women were expected to be more likely to react with these emotionsthan were men Specifically univariate post-hoc analyses revealed that womenwere judged to be significantly more likely to react with sadness fear and guiltin all emotion-relevant situations Further women were judged to besignificantly more likely to react with disgust and shame in all emotionsituations except for sadness situations Finally women were judged to besignificantly more likely than men to react with contempt in disgust guilt and

(g)

Figure 1 (Continued)

620 HESS ET AL

shame situations For happiness the profiles for both genders were parallel andcoincident suggesting that raters not only expected the same pattern of reactionsfrom men and women but also at the same level for each emotion

Discussion

In summary the analyses of the emotion profiles suggest the presence of clearexpectancies regarding not only the core emotion for a given type of situationbut also for the secondary emotional reactions that are expected in the situationAlthough the profiles for men and women are relatively similar with regard totheir major features a number of systematic differences in expectationsregarding menrsquos and womenrsquos emotional reactions emerged for the negativeemotion events but not for the positive

This latter finding is in contrast to the literature on the self-reportedfrequency of happiness expressionsexperiences in men and women (eg Allenamp Haccoun 1976) and with the finding that women are both believed and

TABLE 2Results of profile analyses on expected emotionalreactions for men and women in general (Study 1)

Vignettes F df p

AngerUrban 532 8175 001Rural 333 8169 001

DisgustUrban 507 8175 001Rural 461 8169 001

FearUrban 689 8187 001Rural 294 8163 004

SadnessUrban 489 8187 001Rural 267 8163 009

GuiltUrban 414 8173 001Rural 288 8167 005

ShameUrban 277 8173 007Rural 156 8167 140 (ns)

HappinessUrban 174 8273 090 (ns)Rural 127 8255 257 (ns)

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 621

observed to smile more than men (Briton amp Hall 1995) However given themultiple functions of smiles (see eg Fernandez-Dols amp Ruiz-Belda 1995Frank amp Ekman 1993 LaFrance amp Hecht 1995) differences in smiling may notreflect differences in happiness One explanation for this lack of continuity withthe existing literature is that the results of the present study are based on specificvignettes and not on global recollections Thus possible differences in real-world exposure to happiness-eliciting situations are less likely to influence ourfindings than they are to influence more global assessments

For all negative emotion events the profiles were nonparallel3 that is theratings revealed different expectations for men and women The differences areconsistent with the notion that the gender stereotype for emotional expressivenessdoes not assume women to be more expressive for all emotions For examplewomen are not expected to express more disgust and shame in sadness situationsthan are men Also women are expected to react with more contempt than aremen only in disgust guilt and shame situations while for all other situations nodifferences emerge However women are thought to express more sadness fearshame and guilt for all emotion-eliciting situations except for happiness eventsThat is regardless of the emotion theme prevalent in the vignettes women arealways expected to react with more sadness fear shame and guilt

An interesting case regards happiness as a secondary emotion in situationswith a negative core emotion The data reveal that men are typically expected toexperience more happiness in these situations than are women The differencesare strongest for guilt and shame vignettes which involve notions of cheatingand public misbehaviour and might reflect a difference in value structureinherent in the gender stereotype

In sum the results of Study 1 expand our knowledge regarding genderdifferences in emotion stereotypes by considering secondary emotionalresponses as well as modal emotional responses Specifically women are notonly expected to react with more sadness fear shame and guilt in situations forwhich these emotions are central but are expected to do so in all situationsinvolving negative affect Men on the other hand are expected to react withmore anger in a wide variety of situations involving negative affect as well aswith more happiness in some situations involving negative affect This suggeststhat the prevalent emotion stereotype describes womenrsquos predominant emotionalreactions to be more withdrawing (fear and sadness) and self-directed (shameand guilt) whereas menrsquos emotional reactions are seen as more active andaggressive

But to what degree are these general stereotypesexpectations reflected inthe self-perceptions that people have of their own emotional reactions AsJussim et alrsquos (1991) findings show self-perceptions can diverge from thecultural stereotypes Yet Jussim et al also suggest that over time these

3An exception are the shame profiles for the rural sample

622 HESS ET AL

stereotypical beliefs may act as a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy and moveself-perceptions in the direction of being consistent with the stereotype Alsoit is possible that widely held cultural beliefs become prescriptive and thuslead individuals to describe their own behaviour as being in accordance withthe stereotype Gallois (1994) in a review of emotion communication ininterpersonal situations concludes that emotion communication in suchsituations is highly rule-governed A similar perspective underlies Averillrsquos(1997) argument regarding the notion of emotion roles that have entrancerequirements such that for example a successful display of anger presupposessufficient power to adequately address the anger eliciting issue AlsoStoppard and Gruchy (1993) found that individuals anticipate costs andrewards for showing certain emotions in certain contexts Specifically womenexpect more costs when not expressing positive emotions in an lsquolsquootherrsquorsquo-oriented context whereas men expect rewards for showing positive emotionsregardless of context

Taken together these findings from diverse domains suggest that self-perceptions of emotional reactions should show a clear overlap withstereotypical expectations within any particular culture To the degree that weassume that these influences are due to recollection biases we may furtherspeculate that the overlap is less pronounced when asking about behaviouralreactions in particular social contexts than when asking for reactions inlsquolsquogeneralrsquorsquo or independent of a specific social situation Specifically as data onactual behaviour suggest relatively few sex differences in emotional behaviourwhereas the stereotype suggests a wide range of such differences differences inself-perceptions are more likely to be due to the influence of the culturalstereotypes than to actual behavioural differences between the genders Study 2is focused on an analysis of this possibility

STUDY 2

Study 1 confirmed that at least in the Quebec culture there are widely sharedbeliefs concerning how men and women differ in their emotion-relevantexpressive behaviour The central issue to be addressed in Study 2 therefore isthe degree of parallelism that exists between perceptions of how typical malesand females are perceived to respond to emotional events (Study 1) and self-perceptions of onersquos own emotional expressivity

To answer this question men and women drawn from the same population asin Study 1 were asked to indicate for each of the seven types of emotionsituations employed in Study 1 to what degree they expected to react themselveswith each of nine emotions if this event should happen to them In addition weasked participants to indicate the likelihood that they would show each of ninetypes of behaviours corresponding to the nine emotions of the emotion profileThese measures were embedded in a larger questionnaire that assessed beliefs

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 623

regarding emotional reactions of other social groups4 This placement made surethat the cultural beliefs and stereotypes held by the participants regardingemotional expressivity in general were evoked However the specific issue ofsex differences was not alluded to

Method

Participants A total of 360 students attending junior colleges in theMontreal urban region participated in the study Of these only thoseparticipants whose first language learned and still spoken was French whowere born in the province of Quebec (Canada) who had not lived outside ofQuebec for more than five consecutive years and who identified themselvesas either Canadian or Quebecois and not as a member of any other groupwere retained5 The resulting sample consisted of 289 individuals In total163 women and 126 men with a mean age of 1886 years participated ingroups of between 15 and 40 participants Of these 63 men and 85 womencompleted the emotion profiles and 63 men and 78 women completed thebehavioural reactions scale

Procedure Participants were informed of their right to discontinueparticipation at any time and for any reason The experimenter then distributedthe questionnaires The instructions as well as an example were provided on thefirst page The same instructions as employed in Study 1 were used the onlydifference being that participants were told to think about how they would reactand to indicate the likelihood in percent that they themselves would react witheach of the emotionsbehaviours indicated The same instructions were given forboth the emotion profile and the behavioural reactions scale with the onlydifference being that for the latter the word lsquolsquoemotionrsquorsquo was replaced withlsquolsquobehaviourrsquorsquo

Materials For each of seven emotions (happiness anger fear sadnessdisgust shame and guilt) two of the four vignettes employed in Study 1 wereretained Each participant responded to only one vignette for each emotion andvignettes were counterbalanced across participants

4 In the present context only data from the part of the questionnaire asking participants about howthey themselves would react in the described situation will be presented

5These selection criteria were included because the participants for Study 2 were recruited fromseveral Montreal junior colleges with an ethnically diverse population Emotion stereotypes are wellknown to differ between cultures (Kirouac amp Hess 1999) and the participants in Study 1 wererecruited from an ethnically homogenous population To ensure comparability between the twosamples it was therefore necessary to exclude participants from groups not present in the firstsample

624 HESS ET AL

Dependent measures

Emotion profiles These were computed in the same manner as in Study 1That is responses were averaged across the vignettes representing each specificemotion theme

Behavioural reactions scale This scale is intended to assess thebehavioural reactions that are expected for someone who is experiencing theemotional state in question To construct the scale a two-step procedure wasemployed

First 68 students of the University of Quebec at Montreal 54 women and 14men with a mean age of 279 years were asked to list for each of nineemotions (happiness serenity anger disgust fear contempt sadness shameand guilt) the behaviours and observable reactions they associate with eachspecific emotion The answers were compiled into frequency lists andsynonyms were grouped together The three most frequently namedbehaviours for each emotion were retained Due to overlap between someemotions this procedure yielded a list of 22 behaviours For the second step atotal of 44 participants 28 women and 16 men with a mean age of 226years were asked to rate for each behaviour and each of the nine emotionsthe likelihood of observing the behaviour in a person experiencing theemotion using a 7-point scale (1 very unlikely 7 very likely) Behavioursthat received a mean rating of 6 or above for only one emotion comprise thefinal scale

These consisted of the following items6 to laughto get excited (happiness)to trembleto freeze (fear) to hitto insultto criticise (anger) to cryto isolateoneself (sadness) to grimaceto vomit (disgust) to stareto look hard at(contempt) to smileto relaxto contemplate (serenity) to withdrawto loweronersquos headto blush (shame) to justify oneselfto apologise (guilt) On theprofile measure participants were asked to indicate the likelihood as apercentage that they would show each of the behaviours in a situation like theone described in the vignettes

Data analyses Each participant responded to one scenario for each of theseven emotions themes and used only one type of scale As in Study 1 thedata were collapsed over scenarios Because we had responses from morewomen than men for both dependent measures the data for the femaleparticipants were weighted to create equal cell sizes Profile analyses acrossthe nine emotional reactionsbehaviours were conducted to assess sexdifferences

6These items were translated from the original French by the authors

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 625

Results and discussion

As noted earlier the goal of Study 2 was to assess to what degree the self-perceptions of the men and women who participated in this study overlap withthe general stereotypes found in Study 1 To accomplish this the emotionprofiles from Study 1 were compared with the self-reported emotional profilesand with the behavioural reaction profiles collected here

Self-described emotion profiles The means and standard deviations for thenine scales of the emotion profiles for male and female participants arepresented in Table 3 A comparison of these means with those of the profilesfrom Study 1 reveals substantial similarities between the emotional reactionsexpected for oneself and those expected for men and women in general

Behavioral reactions Table 3 shows the means and standard deviations forthe nine behavioural reaction profiles These profiles represent the participantsself-report of the likelihood that they would display these specific behaviours inthe situations described by the vignettes As the focus of this paper is on sex

TABLE 3Means and standard deviations for self-perceptions of emotional reactionsbehaviours

for men and women (Study 2)

Men Women

Situation Mean SD Mean SD

AngerHappiness 262 1224 006 054Laughget excited 790 1826 429 1168Serenity 262 827 135 532Smilerelaxcontemplate 865 2068 435 1185Sadness 2359 2390 4405 3151Cryisolate oneself 935 2083 1825 2250Fear 603 1589 486 1070Tremblefreeze 332 814 630 1155Anger 6268 2873 6076 2928Hitinsultcriticise 3540 3042 2654 2873Disgust 1175 2447 1094 1997Grimacevomit 194 553 286 854Contempt 1865 2505 2102 2543Starelook hard at 2065 2718 1156 2216Shame 286 827 802 1887Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 1044 2187 1038 1642Guilt 349 826 491 1582Justify oneselfapologise 2045 3072 1761 2663

(Continued)

626 HESS ET AL

TABLE 3(Continued)

Men Women

Situation Mean SD Mean SD

DisgustHappiness 611 1714 143 575Laughget excited 1989 2669 915 1825Serenity 611 1855 208 1159Smilerelaxcontemplate 1159t 2113 578 1482Sadness 516 1537 490 1531Cryisolate oneself 073 403 346 1352Fear 373t 1066 911 2018Tremblefreeze 476t 1154 1015 1977Anger 1359 2146 1437 2521Hitinsultcriticise 1214 2210 1186 2151Disgust 5086 3257 5881 3178Grimacevomit 1167 2121 1692 2236Contempt 1798 2226 1750 2706Starelook hard at 1991 2362 1686 2363Shame 1023 1972 1683 2738Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 645 1663 1169 2337Guilt 262 937 119 378Justify oneselfapologise 992 2511 744 1924

SadnessHappiness 317 1280 412 1594Laughget excited 123 789 128 114Serenity 887t 2017 318 1456Smilerelaxcontemplate 621 1848 346 1196Sadness 7690 2816 8251 2258Cryisolate oneself 6008 3131 6736 3059Fear 849t 1820 1546 2637Tremblefreeze 1595 2763 1135 2068Anger 1825 2641 2261 2919Hitinsultcriticise 532 1399 641 1517Disgust 651t 2015 176 940Grimacevomit 790 2017 353 1318Contempt 659 2125 332 1121Starelook hard at 000 000 045 397Shame 214 1050 141 711Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 2008 2916 724 1680Guilt 1524 2494 2141 2985Justify oneselfapologise 315 1065 391 1478

FearHappiness 317 1487 006 054Laughget excited 203 1054 058 361Serenity 587 1698 082 327

(Continued overleaf)

627

TABLE 3(Continued)

Men Women

Situation Mean SD Mean SD

Smilerelaxcontemplate 1048 2243 182 666Sadness 2333 3051 2929 3588Cryisolate oneself 1306 2536 3022 3582Fear 5111 3207 7535 2715Tremblefreeze 2008 2565 3378 3378Anger 2468 3297 1954 2949Hitinsultcriticise 1222 2098 446 1410Disgust 787 1808 1006 2206Grimacevomit 429 1270 365 1115Contempt 1192 2216 1141 2078Starelook hard at 677 1822 391 1405Shame 143 470 200 615Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 1606 2579 1000 2117Guilt 794 2199 369 995Justify oneselfapologise 282 1263 276 1319

ShameHappiness 452 1596 144 1039Laughget excited 1825 2905 1387 1990Serenity 444 1492 182 1028Smilerelaxcontemplate 1206t 2333 623 1262Sadness 1151 2121 2077 2361Cryisolate oneself 334 877 426 1107Fear 1246 2431 1135 1700Tremblefreeze 776 1569 894 1491Anger 1262 2259 1432 2408Hitinsultcriticise 565 1478 314 1140Disgust 206 966 347 1244Grimacevomit 202 590 231 1086Contempt 730 1532 811 1880Starelook hard at 347 833 304 1160Shame 4819 3534 5968 2948Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 2563 2974 2885 2908Guilt 3095 3442 4788 3282Justify oneselfapologise 4379 3144 4256 3074

GuiltHappiness 1024 2432 355 1189Laughget excited 734 2259 584 1761Serenity 262 1008 223 771Smilerelaxcontemplate 645 1692 416 1409Sadness 2003t 2705 2971 3390Cryisolate oneself 960 1992 2273 2979Fear 1778 2667 2653 3305

(Continued)

628

differences we will not discuss these data in detail However two things arenoteworthy First both men and women report lower probabilities that theywould react with a certain behaviour for example lsquolsquoto laughto get excitedrsquorsquothan with the emotion that corresponds to the behaviour (happiness) Thisfinding is not unexpected as individuals do not always express their emotionsoutwardly or may have developed idiosyncratic means of expressing certainemotions Second the profile data for the behaviours resemble strongly theemotional reactions reported For example for anger the highest means arefound for to hitto insultto criticise for to cryto isolate one self and for to stare

TABLE 3(Continued)

Men Women

Situation Mean SD Mean SD

Tremblefreeze 1206 2212 1227 2024Anger 1762 2980 1926 2950Hitinsultcriticise 129 543 221 720Disgust 1248 2569 1152 2402Grimacevomit 581 1642 351 1385Contempt 1603 2857 1464 2611Starelook hard at 129 495 136 485Shame 2667 3227 5375 3467Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 1952 2472 1769 2333Guilt 5071 3885 5753 3372Justify oneselfapologise 4484 3581 4286 3608

HappinessHappiness 8913 1981 9106 1471Laughget excited 5763 3420 6069 3283Serenity 2738t 3650 3906 3797Smilerelaxcontemplate 5451 3445 4647 3432Sadness 127 946 020 123Cryisolate oneself 040 318 029 141Fear 103 372 206 680Tremblefreeze 419t 1313 090 057Anger 032 252 000 000Hitinsultcriticise 000 000 013 114Disgust 048 378 000 000Grimacevomit 000 000 000 000Contempt 081 522 000 000Starelook hard at 355 1392 147 388Shame 111 764 000 000Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 718 1905 687 1859Guilt 270 1526 000 000Justify oneselfapologise 355 1535 090 340

Note Significant differences between men and women tp lt 1 p lt 05 p lt 01 p lt 001

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 629

to look hard at which correspond to anger sadness and contempt reactionsrespectively

However a number of differences between these two types of profiles canalso be observed For example for the emotional reaction profiles for anger andsadness the second highest mean is found for guilt whereas for the behaviouralreaction profiles for these emotions the second highest mean is found for shamebehaviours (to withdrawto lower onersquos headto blush) This findings may be dueto the general confusion between shame and guilt that has been observed forWestern cultures (see eg Wallbott amp Scherer 1994)

Sex differences To assess whether male and female participants differedwith regard to their expected emotional reactions and behaviours in the differentemotion eliciting situations profile analyses were conducted on the ratings foreach emotion situation All analyses and post-hoc tests were conducted at analpha level of 05 The results are shown in Table 4

TABLE 4Results of profile analyses on self-reported likelihood

of emotional reactionsbehaviours for men andwomen (Study 2)

Vignettes F df p

AngerReactions 295 8116 005Behaviours 183 8113 079

DisgustReactions 169 8115 107Behaviours 173 8116 099

FearReactions 330 8116 002Behaviours 390 8116 001

SadnessReactions 207 8116 044Behaviours 170 8115 105

GuiltReactions 186 8117 071Behaviours 130 8115 251

ShameReactions 215 8116 037Behaviours 70 8116 689

HappinessReactions 106 8116 397Behaviours 109 8116 376

630 HESS ET AL

Emotional reactions For all emotion situations except disgust andhappiness the emotional reactions profiles were nonparallel or marginallynonparallel (see Table 4) For the nonparallel profiles post-hoc tests revealedthat a similar pattern of sex differences emerged across the different emotionthemes For happiness and serenity there were either no significant differencesbetween men and women or men reported experiencing these emotions with ahigher probability than did women Conversely for sadness fear shame andguilt there were either no significant sex differences or women reported feelingthese emotions with a higher probability than did men For anger disgust andcontempt reactions no significant differences emerged

Emotional behaviour profiles Only the fear profile was significantlynonparallel (different) for men and women The profiles for anger and disgustwere marginally nonparallel and the remaining profiles were all parallel andcoincident Thus fewer significant differences between menrsquos and womenrsquosexpected behaviours in the situations described by the vignettes were found thanwas the case for the expected emotional reactions in Studies 1 and 2 Yet it isimportant to note that the probabilities reported for the behavioural profiles werelower overall and it is thus possible that this lack of differences is due to a lackof sensitivity of the measure

As postulated based on previous research (eg Crawford Clippax OnyxGault amp Benton 1992) as well as on the emotional reactions profile womenreport a higher probability of either crying or isolating oneself in an angersituation than do men Conversely and in accordance with both the literature onanger expression (see earlier) and the results from the emotional reactionsprofile men report it more likely to hitto insultto criticise than women thoughthis difference is not significant In addition they report that they aresignificantly more likely to stareto look hard (contempt) than do women abehaviour that could also be interpreted as aggressive when shown in responseto an insult

As regards the disgust situations men report that they are more likely tolaughto get excited This sex difference matches the finding for the emotionalreactions profile but was not found in Study 1 Finally for the fear situation menreport that they are more likely to hitto insultto criticise as well as to smiletorelaxto contemplate (serenity) than do women The emotional reactions profilefor fear from this study shows that men report a higher probability of reactingwith serenity but not with anger than do women As these behaviourscorrespond to a macho or cool demeanour in a threatening situation they fit thegeneral stereotype of masculine behaviour Conversely women report to bemore likely to trembleto freeze as well as to cryto isolate one self in fearsituations

In sum although many fewer sex differences reached significance whencomparing self-reported expected behaviours for men and women the pattern of

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 631

results is largely congruent with previous findings Specifically women reporteda higher probability of showing behaviours congruent with sadness and fear thandid men whereas men reported higher probabilities for anger and serenebehaviours In addition men reported a higher probability of showing acontempt behaviour in an anger situation yet the relevant behaviour (to staretolook hard) could be interpreted as aggressive in that context

How congruent are the findings fromStudies 1 and 2

As mentioned earlier not all significant differences found in Study 1 for theexpected reactions for men and women in general were also found for self-reports of expected reactions by men and women for themselves Yet as theresults for the two studies are based on different degrees of freedomsignificance levels cannot be directly compared To assess whether stereotypicaland self-reported sex differences were of similar magnitude we computed theeffect sizes for both studies Table 5 shows Cohenrsquos d for the post-hoc

TABLE 5Cohenrsquos d for sex differences in Studies 1 and 2

Study 1 Study 2

SituationEmotionalreactions

Emotionalreactions

Emotionalbehaviours

AngerHappiness 7023Serenity 7025Sadness 203 073 041Fear 123 030Anger 7055 7030Disgust 068Contempt 7026Shame 117 7035Guilt 129

DisgustHappiness 7032 7037 7047Serenity 7045 7026 7021Sadness 095 027Fear 189 033 033AngerDisgust 160 024 024Contempt 050Shame 062 7028 026Guilt 062 020

(Continued)

632 HESS ET AL

TABLE 5(Continued)

Study 1 Study 2

SituationEmotionalreactions

Emotionalreactions

Emotionalbehaviours

SadnessHappiness 7053Serenity 7032Sadness 184 022 024Fear 171 031Anger 7065 042Disgust 7030 7025Contempt 021Shame 020 7046 054Guilt 176 022 7033

FearHappiness 7021 7030Serenity 7026 7041 7052Sadness 189 055Fear 221 082 046Anger 7084 7043Disgust 067ContemptShame 049 7026Guilt 172 7025

ShameHappiness 7045 7023Serenity 7027 7020 7031Sadness 175 041Fear 128Anger 7069Disgust 065Contempt 054Shame 154 035Guilt 153 050

GuiltHappiness 7107 7035Serenity 7051Sadness 198 032 051Fear 162 029AngerDisgust 128Contempt 075Shame 178 051Guilt 183 020

633

comparisons for each emotion in the profile for the six negative emotionsituations across the two studies For Study 1 the effect sizes for the urban andthe rural sample were combined To facilitate the reading of the table onlydifferences for which d was at least 020 (ie equivalent to a small effect) areshown In general effect sizes for Study 1 are larger than those for Study 2 Foremotional reactions the expected differences between men and women were ofmedium (gt 050) to large (gt 080) size whereas for self-perceptions the expecteddifferences between men and women were small to medium in size

The most stable sex difference across the two studies was found for sadnessboth as a core emotion in sadness vignettes and as a secondary emotion That isfor all negative emotions the general stereotype describes women as reactingwith more sadness and women also perceive themselves as reacting with moresadness andor report more sadness behaviours Further women are expected toreact with (and they self-report) more shame and guilt reactionsbehaviours inshame and guilt situations However for the other negative emotions (angerdisgust sadness and fear) men report higher levels of shame reactions or shamebehaviours (but not both) Finally fear reactions and behaviours are described asmore likely for women in general and women perceive themselves as reactingwith more fear in disgust sadness fear and guilt situations

Another very stable sex difference across studies regards happiness andserenity reactions for negative emotion vignettes Men consistently are bothexpected to react with and self-report more happiness reactions as well ashappiness behaviours for disgust fear and shame vignettes To a lesser degreethis pattern also emerges for sadness and guilt vignettes As mentioned in thediscussion of Study 1 this may reflect differences in the value structure betweenmen and women

In sum a comparison of effect sizes shows considerable consistency acrossthe two studies Specifically noteworthy is the very consistent finding for boththe stereotypical beliefs and the self-reports with regard to sadness reactionswhich are considered as more likely for women than for men for all negativeemotion situations studied

However a number of differences between the general stereotypes and theself-perceptions also emerged specifically with regard to shame reactionsWhereas women are generally believed to be more likely to react with shameto negative emotion events the self-reported likelihood for shame as aconcomitant emotion is higher for men for all situations except for guilt(given the general confusion regarding these states observed in Westerncultures this may be due to shame being a core rather than a concomitantemotion for guilt scenarios) Yet self-reported shame behaviours are morelikely for women than for men in sadness and disgust situations A possibleexplanation is that men are actively trying to not show shame reactionsmdashtoconform to the general stereotypemdashbut are aware that they nonetheless arelikely to feel shame in those situations

634 HESS ET AL

To conclude the general stereotype and self-perceptions of emotionalreactions and behaviours suggest that women react with more sadness to all typesof negative emotion events Further the stereotypes and the self-perceptions arein agreement on menrsquos greater likelihood to react with happiness and serenity to avariety of negative emotions In contrast differences between the generalstereotypes and self-perceptions emerge for shame reactions with men reportingin situations when shame is a secondary emotion a higher likelihood of shamereactions but not necessarily shame behaviours than do women

STUDY 3

The results from Study 2 suggest that the stereotypical beliefs regarding menrsquosand womenrsquos emotional reactions and behaviours in a variety of emotion-inducing situations converge with self-perceptions of menrsquos and womenrsquosemotional reactions and behaviours in those same situations This finding isconsistent with the notion that autobiographic statements that requireparticipants to summarise over a number of related experiences may be biasedby stereotypical expectations (see eg Feldman-Barrett et al 1998) This leadsto the question of whether a similar overlap can also be found for narratives ofsingle specific emotional events from the participantsrsquo past If stereotypesindeed influence the way emotional events are reconstructed in a narrative wewould expect to find that women report more sadness events and express moresadness overall as well as more intense target emotions for all but anger eventsConversely we would expect men to report more situations involving anger aswell as experiencing more happiness and serenity overall

However as Study 3 is based on personal narratives and not on standardisedvignettes such a finding could simply be due to the fact that the emotionantecedent events in a real-life setting differ for men and women To assess thispossibility we decided to measure the emotion antecedent events by means of anappraisal questionnaire that assesses the participantsrsquo perception of the emotionantecedent situation To the degree that perceptions of emotion antecedents aresimilar for men and women while reported emotional reactions differ we canconclude that observed sex differences are not due to differences in theperception of the event per se For example if womenrsquos tendency to report moresadness were due to a difference in the perception of the emotion antecedentsituation we would expect women to report more often that they did not feel thatthey could do anything to change the situation or that they had to adapt to thesituation (as sadness is generally associated with the notion of irrevocable loss)

Overview

For this study we translated and adapted a questionnaire reported by Scherer(1988) that consists of two parts The first part invites the participants todescribe an event during which they experienced an emotion The second part

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 635

asks specific questions regarding the appraisal process We added a section inwhich we asked participants to complete an emotion profile for the event Toavoid the possibility that men and women would relate narratives from widelydifferent types of situations we asked participants to describe an event related tofamily interactions This class of situations should be readily accessible to allparticipants and ensure that emotional events involving human interactionpartners were reported

Allowing participants to choose the type of emotional events they report hasseveral advantages Most importantly we can assess what type of emotionalevents men and women choose to report spontaneously It also permitsparticipants to choose a salient event for which they can recollect theinformation necessary to respond to the appraisal questions On the other handthis approach is unlikely to result in a well-balanced distribution of emotiontopics thus making it difficult or impossible to analyse the data separately fordifferent emotion themes Yet in the context of the present study we were onlyinterested in sex differences in reports and not in absolute levels of responsesStudies 1 and 2 suggest that sex differences are very stable across all negativeemotions We therefore decided to allow participants to choose the emotiontheme and analysed the data collapsed across all negative emotion themes

Method

Participants A total of 171 students 87 men and 84 women with a meanage of 1862 years participated in this study Most of the participants (147) wererecruited from an ethnically homogenous junior college in the larger Montrealurban area (Cegep Lionel-Groulx Ste-Therese Quebec Canada) and partici-pated in groups An additional 24 participants were recruited individually

Procedure The experimenter explained that the study concerned emotionalevents in peoplersquos lives Participants were informed of their right to discontinueparticipation at any time and for any reason The experimenter then distributedthe questionnaires and responded to questions regarding the procedure The tasktook between 10 and 30 minutes Most of this time difference can be attributedto the amount of detail provided in the event description that ranged from acouple of words (eg birth of my daughter) to well over a page

Dependent measures The questionnaire consisted of four parts The firstpart was an open-ended question asking the participants to describe any eventinvolving their family life that led them to experience an emotion Sadnessshame anger guilt joy fear and disgust were provided as examples ofemotions Participants were asked to give a detailed description of the situationincluding the events that led up to it their reactions and those of others presentIn addition they were asked to identify the people involved with respect to their

636 HESS ET AL

relationship with them (eg my partner my sister etc) as well as to identify themain emotion theme of the story This served to ensure that the participantsbased their answers to the following questions on a specific event and not on aclass of similar events

Emotion description The second part of the questionnaire consisted ofquestions regarding when the event happened for how long they felt theemotion and the intensity of the core emotion identified as the emotion theme ofthe story Participants were also asked to indicate whether they tried to hide orcontrol their feelings and to what degree This part also contained the emotionprofile used in Studies 1 and 2 Using this measure participants were asked toindicate to what percentage they had felt each of the nine emotions from theprofile

Appraisal questionnaire A series of questions regarding the appraisal processwere used to assess the emotion antecedent events These questions weretranslated from the questionnaire reported by Scherer (1988) Specificallyparticipants were asked to what degree they had expected the situation to occurhow pleasant or unpleasant they considered the event whether the event helpedor hindered them in achieving their aims to what degree they considered that thesituation or the event that caused the emotion was unjust or unfair whether theevent was caused by their own or by someone elsersquos behaviour to what degreethey considered that the behaviour that caused the event would be judged asimproper or immoral by their acquaintances how the event affected theirfeelings about themselves such as their self-esteem or self-confidence andfinally to what degree the event changed their relationships with the peopleinvolved (all on negative-positive 7-point bipolar scales)

In addition participants were given a list of 11 specific potential causes of theevent (caused it myself natural causes act of god etc) They also evaluatedtheir ability to act upon or to cope with the event and its consequences using ascale involving 5 options The last part of the questionnaire consisted ofquestions regarding the participantsrsquo sex their age and whether they werecurrently seeing someone in a love-based relationship and if so for how long

Results

Of the 171 reported emotion events 147 (74 reported by men and 73 reported bywomen) concerned negative emotional events Of these a total of 62 weresadness events 22 were anger events and 11 were guilt events The remainingevents were distributed over a large number of negative emotions

As expected the very low frequency of reports for specific emotion themesmade separate analyses of reports of these events unfeasible We thereforedecided to perform analyses on the data summed over all negative emotionthemes The 24 events with positive emotion themes were obviously excludedfrom these analyses

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 637

Do women report more sadness events and men more anger events Toaddress this question a chi-square test was performed on the frequency withwhich men and women labeled the reported event as a sad versus an anger eventIn line with the results of Studies 1 and 2 we found men to report more angerevents and women to report more sadness events Specifically 14 men and 8women reported anger events and 25 men and 37 women reported sad events w2

= 355 p = 06 d = 42Do women report more intense core emotions than men For the intensity of

the core emotion experienced during the event women reported significantlyhigher levels (M = 593 SD = 101) than men (M = 554 SD = 123) t(145) =222 p = 028 d = 37

Do women and men report different levels of negative emotions across theemotion profile Figure 2 presents the emotion profiles separately for men andwomen An inspection of the profiles shows that overall men report morehappinessserenity whereas women report higher levels of all other emotionsThe profiles are nonparallel F(8 137) = 5877 p lt 001 Post-hoc analysesrevealed a significant sex difference in self-reported sadness with womenreporting higher levels than men To compare the sex differences in the profiles

Figure 2 Emotion profile for menrsquos and womenrsquos self-reported emotional reactions to negativeemotion events (Study 3)

638 HESS ET AL

found in this study with those from Studies 1 and 2 effect sizes were calculatedUsing the same cut-off point as previously (small effect size d = 020) only twodifferences were found to be stable across the three studies Men report higherlevels of happiness for negative emotion events (d = 7022) and women reporthigher levels of sadness (d = 043) As the latter difference may be due to thehigher frequency of reported sadness events by women we also verified whetherwomen report higher levels of sadness when sadness events are excluded fromthe analysis An inspection of the means revealed a marginally significantdifference in the same direction M = 6472 SD = 3247 and M = 5108 SD =3684 for women and men respectively t(83) = 181 p = 074 d = 40

Are there differences in appraisal patterns between men and women Asmentioned earlier the reported differences in emotional reactions could be dueto differences in the perception of the emotion antecedent events Yet nodifferences in appraisal patterns were found suggesting that emotion antecedentevents were perceived similarly In addition despite the more frequent and moreintense reports of sadness women did not report different coping styles thanmen and did not seem to feel more helpless (38 men vs 34 women report thisreaction) In fact women more frequently report that they felt able to lsquolsquoinfluencethe situation positivelyrsquorsquo (19 women vs 9 men report this reaction though thedifference is not significant)

Discussion

Study 3 extended the study of emotion stereotypes and self-perceptions based onvignettes to narratives of emotional events that the participants had in factexperienced themselves The goal of the study was to investigate whether thefindings from Studies 1 and 2 generalise to such recollections of personal eventsThe results strongly suggest this to be the case Women again report higherlevels of sadness for negative emotion events They also report more sad eventsin general Men on the other hand report more anger events as well as morehappiness for negative emotion events as was found in both Studies 1 and 2 Yetno reported differences in appraisal or coping emerged This suggests that theobserved differences in emotional reactions are not due to a bias in the appraisalprocess nor to an inability to act upon the event

If emotion antecedents do not differ why are differences in emotionalreactions reported We suggest that such differences represent an influence ofthe general emotion stereotype on the narrative reconstruction of a personalevent This conclusion is based on the observation of a null effect and thus opento the critique that the present study lacked the power necessary to detect realdifferences in appraisal between men and women To assess this critique wecalculated the absolute mean effect size for the interval-scaled appraisalquestions to be d = 015 To achieve 80 power a sample of 1100 participantswould be needed These data underscore the very slim differences in appraisals

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 639

between men and women making it highly unlikely that the effects observed inthis study are mediated by a difference in appraisal and thus by a difference inthe perception of the underlying event

CONCLUSIONS

The present series of studies had the goal to assess general emotion stereotypesand their influence on self-perceptions of emotional reactions by men andwomen We wanted to both describe these stereotypes in more detail with regardnot only to the modal emotion for a specific event (such as sadness reactions to aloss) but also with regard to the secondary emotions present in these situationsFurther we wanted to assess to what degree such expectations for men andwomen in general are endorsed by individuals for themselves as well as whetherthey would be spontaneously reported when relating a personally experiencedevent

Two gender differences were found to be stable across all three experimentalparadigms Women are expected to be more likely to react with sadness in allnegative emotion situations they expect themselves to be more likely to reactwith sadness as well as to cry and to withdraw more and finally women reportmore sadness in personal events In contrast men are expected to react withmore happinessserenity during negative emotional situations they expectthemselves to react more frequently this way as well as to laugh and smile moreand to be more relaxed They also tend to report more happiness whendescribing negative personal events

Not all general emotion stereotypes were found in the self-perceptionsstudied in Studies 2 and 3 Specifically according to Study 1 women areexpected to be more likely to react with shame and guilt in all negative emotionsituations Yet women did not expect to do so for themselves in situations otherthan shame and guilt situations and in fact men reported to be more likely toreact with shame in a variety of situations Further men and women did notreport any differences with regard to experiences of shame and guilt during thepersonal events

Study 3 included an appraisal questionnaire to address the question whetherthe self-reported differences in emotionality between men and women are due todifferences in the appraisal of the emotion antecedent events or rather to theinfluence of the prevalent norms No differences in appraisals were detectedsuggesting that the self-reported differences may be due to the normative forcesof the general stereotype rather than to appraisal differences

It may be argued that the Study 3 is based on recollections of past events andthat self-reports of emotional experiences represent after the fact reconstructionsthat differ from the actually experienced emotions during the event (seeParkinson amp Manstead 1993) A related argument may be made for Study 2where participants had to estimate the likelihood of their emotional reactions to

640 HESS ET AL

hypothetical events (even though the latter were chosen to be common everydayevents) This may well be true Yet the question remains why did men andwomen reconstruct the events differently in terms of their emotional reactionsThe answer would then be that the prevalent emotion stereotype which islargely endorsed by the population studied influenced this reconstruction Yetas peoplesrsquo sense of self depends on their past histories this would imply thatreconstructions of emotional events in line with emotion stereotypes mayeventually lead individuals to conform more closely to these stereotypes as theybecome more and more part of their emotional history and eventually of theiremotional self

Manuscript received 30 May 1997Revised manuscript received 23 February 2000

REFERENCES

Adams S Kuebli J Boyle PA amp Fivush R (1995) Gender differences in parent-childconversations about past emotions A longitudinal investigation Sex Roles 33 309ndash323

Allen JG amp Haccoun DM (1976) Sex differences in emotionality A multidimensional approachHuman Relations 29 711ndash722

Averill JR (1997) The emotions An integrative approach In R Hogan JA Johnson amp SRBriggs (Eds) Handbook of personality psychology (pp 513ndash541) San Diego CA AcademicPress

Birnbaum DW (1983) Preschoolersrsquo stereotypes about sex differences in emotionality Areaffirmation Journal of Genetic Psychology 143 139ndash140

Briton NJ amp Hall JA (1995) Gender-based expectancies and observer judgements of smilingJournal of Nonverbal Behavior 19 49ndash65

Brody LR amp Hall JA (1993) Gender and emotion In M Lewis amp JM Haviland (Eds)Handbook of emotions (pp 447-460) New York Guilford Press

Crawford J Clippax S Onyx J Gault U amp Benton P (1992) Emotion and genderConstructing meaning from memory London Sage

Dunn J Bretherton I amp Munn P (1987) Conversations about feeling states between mothers andtheir children Developmental Psychology 23 132ndash139

Eagly AH amp Mladinic A (1989) Gender stereotypes and attitudes toward women and menPersonality and Social Psychology Bulletin 15 543ndash558

Ekman P amp Friesen W (1986) A new pan-cultural facial expression of emotion Motivation andEmotion 10 159ndash168

Feldman-Barrett L Robin L Pietromonaco PR amp Eysell KM (1998) Are women the moreemotional sex Evidence from emotional experiences in social context Cognition and Emotion12 555ndash578

Fernandez-Dols J-M amp Ruiz-Belda M-A (1995) Are smiles a sign of happiness Gold medalwinners at the Olympic Games Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 69 1113ndash1119

Fischer A (1993) Sex differences in emotionality Fact or stereotype Feminism and Psychology 3303ndash318

Fivush R (1989) Exploring differences in the emotional content of mother child conversationsabout the past Sex Roles 20 675ndash691

Frank MG amp Ekman P (1993) Not all smiles are created equal The differences betweenenjoyment and nonenjoymen t smiles [Special Issue Current issues in psychological humorresearch] Humor International Journal of Humor Research 6 9ndash26

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 641

Gallois C (1994) Group membership social rules and power A social psychologica l perspectiveon emotional communication Journal of Pragmatics 22 301ndash324

Hall JA (1984) Nonverbal sex differences Communication accuracy and expressive styleBaltimore MD Johns Hopkins University Press

Izard C (1972) Patterns of emotions A new analysis of anxiety and depression New YorkAcademic Press

Jussim L Milbourn M amp Nelson W (1991) Emotional openness Sex-role stereotypes and self-perceptions Representative Research in Social Psychology 19 35ndash52

Kirouac G amp Hess U (1999) Group membership and the decoding of nonverbal behavior In PPhilippot R Feldman amp E Coats (Eds) The social context of nonverbal behavior (pp 182ndash210) New York Cambridge University Press

Kring AM amp Gordon AH (1998) Sex differences in emotion Expression experience andphysiology Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74 686ndash703

LaFrance M amp Banaji M (1992) Toward a reconsideration of the gender-emotion relationship InMS Clark (Ed) Emotion and social behavior Review of personality and social psychology(Vol 14 pp 178ndash201) Newbury Park CA Sage

LaFrance M amp Hecht MA (1995) Why smiles generate leniency Personality and SocialPsychology Bulletin 21 207ndash214

Lazarus RS (1991) Emotion and adaptation Oxford UK Oxford University PressParkinson B amp Manstead ASR (1993) Making sense of emotion in stories and social life

Cognition and Emotion 7 295ndash323Plutchik R (1980) Emotion A psychoevolutionar y synthesis New York Harper amp RowRime B Mesquita B Philippot P amp Boca S (1991) Beyond the emotional event Six studies on

the social sharing of emotion Cognition and Emotion 5 435ndash465Scherer KR (1988) Appendix C Questionnaire used in the International Survey on Emotion

Antecedents and Reactions (ISEAR) In KR Scherer (Ed) Facets of emotion Recent researchHillsdale NJ Erlbaum

Sherman JW amp Bessenhoff GR (1999) Stereotypes as source monitoring cues On theinteraction between episodic and semantic memory Psychological Science 10 106ndash110

Stoppard JM amp Gruchy CD (1993) Gender context and expression of positive emotionPersonality and Social Psychology Bulletin 19 143ndash150

Tucker JS amp Riggio RE (1988) The role of social skills in encoding posed and spontaneousfacial expressions Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 12 87ndash97

Wallbott HG amp Scherer KR (1994) Cultural determinants in experiencing shame and guilt InJune Price Tangney amp Kurt W Fischer (Eds) Self conscious emotions The psychology of shameand guilt embarrasment and pride (pp 465ndash487) New York Guilford Press

642 HESS ET AL

Emotion profiles As expected distinct profiles emerged for each of theemotion themes (see Figures 1andashg) Further the profiles describing menrsquos andwomenrsquos perceived reactions were not parallel (see later) however the profileswere generally similar with regard to their major features As the focus of thepresent paper concerns sex differences we will restrict the discussion of theoverall form of the profiles to two general observations First the profiles for allnegative emotion situations show a prominent peak for the target emotion aswell as secondary peaks That is the perceived reactions to the emotional eventsused here typically involved both secondary emotions as well as a modalemotion It should be noted that an inspection of the raw data suggests that thepeaks for both modal and secondary emotions are reflected in the individualratings and are not an artefact of averaging over divergent ratings Put anotherway the derived lsquolsquoaveragersquorsquo profiles reflect those obtained from individualperceivers

As Figure 1 shows anger sadness and contempt were frequently expected toco-occur Further participants expected similar levels of shame and guilt forvignettes involving either of these specific emotions This suggests that thesetwo emotions were not well differentiated by the participants a finding that is inaccordance with the notion that in Western cultures shame and guilt are not asseparate as is the case in some other cultures (see eg Wallbott amp Scherer1994) Second the profile for the happiness-eliciting events was characterisedby the absence of any other expected emotion with the exception of a smallpercentage of occasions where serenity was also anticipated This suggests thathappiness was expected to occur as a relatively lsquolsquopurersquorsquo emotion However as acaveat one should note that only two positive emotions (happiness and serenity)were included in the list of possible emotional reactions and that serenity can beseen as a level of happiness rather than as an emotion distinct from it

Perceived sex differences To assess whether the profiles for menrsquos andwomenrsquos expected reactions to the different emotion eliciting situations wereparallel and coincident profile analyses were conducted on the mean ratings forthe four vignettes representing each emotion These analyses were conductedseparately for the rural and urban samples However the general findings for thetwo samples are identical and most post-hoc comparisons that reach significancein one sample do so in the other Therefore to facilitate the visual presentation ofthe data Figure 1 shows the data combined over the two samples However the F-values for the analyses are presented in Table 2 separately for the two samplesAll analyses and post-hoc tests were conducted with an alpha level of 05

For all emotion situations except shame and happiness profiles for menrsquos andwomenrsquos expected reactions were nonparallel for both samples (see Table 2)For shame vignettes the two profiles from the urban sample were parallelwhereas for happiness the profiles were parallel for both the urban and ruralgroups

616 HESS ET AL

(a)

(b)

Figure 1 Emotion profiles for menrsquos and womenrsquos expected emotional reaction as a function ofemotion theme (Study 1)

(Continued overleaf)

617

(c)

(d)

Figure 1 (Continued)

618

(e)

(f)

Figure 1 (Continued) (Continued overleaf)

619

In general the same differences between menrsquos and womenrsquos expectedemotional reactions were found for all negative emotion vignettes Regardless ofthe central emotion theme of the vignettes univariate post-hoc tests on theparticipantsrsquo ratings of expected anger happiness and serenity either revealedno differences in expected reactions between men and women or they revealedthat a higher percentage of men than women were expected to react with theseemotion displays Men were judged to be significantly more likely to expressanger in sadness anger shame and fear situations Further men were judged tobe significantly more likely than women to express happiness in guilt shameand sadness situations and to express serenity in guilt situations

On the other hand a different pattern emerged for participantsrsquo ratings ofexpected sadness fear disgust contempt shame and guilt For these emotionalreactions differences emerged for almost all negative emotion situations and inall cases women were expected to be more likely to react with these emotionsthan were men Specifically univariate post-hoc analyses revealed that womenwere judged to be significantly more likely to react with sadness fear and guiltin all emotion-relevant situations Further women were judged to besignificantly more likely to react with disgust and shame in all emotionsituations except for sadness situations Finally women were judged to besignificantly more likely than men to react with contempt in disgust guilt and

(g)

Figure 1 (Continued)

620 HESS ET AL

shame situations For happiness the profiles for both genders were parallel andcoincident suggesting that raters not only expected the same pattern of reactionsfrom men and women but also at the same level for each emotion

Discussion

In summary the analyses of the emotion profiles suggest the presence of clearexpectancies regarding not only the core emotion for a given type of situationbut also for the secondary emotional reactions that are expected in the situationAlthough the profiles for men and women are relatively similar with regard totheir major features a number of systematic differences in expectationsregarding menrsquos and womenrsquos emotional reactions emerged for the negativeemotion events but not for the positive

This latter finding is in contrast to the literature on the self-reportedfrequency of happiness expressionsexperiences in men and women (eg Allenamp Haccoun 1976) and with the finding that women are both believed and

TABLE 2Results of profile analyses on expected emotionalreactions for men and women in general (Study 1)

Vignettes F df p

AngerUrban 532 8175 001Rural 333 8169 001

DisgustUrban 507 8175 001Rural 461 8169 001

FearUrban 689 8187 001Rural 294 8163 004

SadnessUrban 489 8187 001Rural 267 8163 009

GuiltUrban 414 8173 001Rural 288 8167 005

ShameUrban 277 8173 007Rural 156 8167 140 (ns)

HappinessUrban 174 8273 090 (ns)Rural 127 8255 257 (ns)

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 621

observed to smile more than men (Briton amp Hall 1995) However given themultiple functions of smiles (see eg Fernandez-Dols amp Ruiz-Belda 1995Frank amp Ekman 1993 LaFrance amp Hecht 1995) differences in smiling may notreflect differences in happiness One explanation for this lack of continuity withthe existing literature is that the results of the present study are based on specificvignettes and not on global recollections Thus possible differences in real-world exposure to happiness-eliciting situations are less likely to influence ourfindings than they are to influence more global assessments

For all negative emotion events the profiles were nonparallel3 that is theratings revealed different expectations for men and women The differences areconsistent with the notion that the gender stereotype for emotional expressivenessdoes not assume women to be more expressive for all emotions For examplewomen are not expected to express more disgust and shame in sadness situationsthan are men Also women are expected to react with more contempt than aremen only in disgust guilt and shame situations while for all other situations nodifferences emerge However women are thought to express more sadness fearshame and guilt for all emotion-eliciting situations except for happiness eventsThat is regardless of the emotion theme prevalent in the vignettes women arealways expected to react with more sadness fear shame and guilt

An interesting case regards happiness as a secondary emotion in situationswith a negative core emotion The data reveal that men are typically expected toexperience more happiness in these situations than are women The differencesare strongest for guilt and shame vignettes which involve notions of cheatingand public misbehaviour and might reflect a difference in value structureinherent in the gender stereotype

In sum the results of Study 1 expand our knowledge regarding genderdifferences in emotion stereotypes by considering secondary emotionalresponses as well as modal emotional responses Specifically women are notonly expected to react with more sadness fear shame and guilt in situations forwhich these emotions are central but are expected to do so in all situationsinvolving negative affect Men on the other hand are expected to react withmore anger in a wide variety of situations involving negative affect as well aswith more happiness in some situations involving negative affect This suggeststhat the prevalent emotion stereotype describes womenrsquos predominant emotionalreactions to be more withdrawing (fear and sadness) and self-directed (shameand guilt) whereas menrsquos emotional reactions are seen as more active andaggressive

But to what degree are these general stereotypesexpectations reflected inthe self-perceptions that people have of their own emotional reactions AsJussim et alrsquos (1991) findings show self-perceptions can diverge from thecultural stereotypes Yet Jussim et al also suggest that over time these

3An exception are the shame profiles for the rural sample

622 HESS ET AL

stereotypical beliefs may act as a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy and moveself-perceptions in the direction of being consistent with the stereotype Alsoit is possible that widely held cultural beliefs become prescriptive and thuslead individuals to describe their own behaviour as being in accordance withthe stereotype Gallois (1994) in a review of emotion communication ininterpersonal situations concludes that emotion communication in suchsituations is highly rule-governed A similar perspective underlies Averillrsquos(1997) argument regarding the notion of emotion roles that have entrancerequirements such that for example a successful display of anger presupposessufficient power to adequately address the anger eliciting issue AlsoStoppard and Gruchy (1993) found that individuals anticipate costs andrewards for showing certain emotions in certain contexts Specifically womenexpect more costs when not expressing positive emotions in an lsquolsquootherrsquorsquo-oriented context whereas men expect rewards for showing positive emotionsregardless of context

Taken together these findings from diverse domains suggest that self-perceptions of emotional reactions should show a clear overlap withstereotypical expectations within any particular culture To the degree that weassume that these influences are due to recollection biases we may furtherspeculate that the overlap is less pronounced when asking about behaviouralreactions in particular social contexts than when asking for reactions inlsquolsquogeneralrsquorsquo or independent of a specific social situation Specifically as data onactual behaviour suggest relatively few sex differences in emotional behaviourwhereas the stereotype suggests a wide range of such differences differences inself-perceptions are more likely to be due to the influence of the culturalstereotypes than to actual behavioural differences between the genders Study 2is focused on an analysis of this possibility

STUDY 2

Study 1 confirmed that at least in the Quebec culture there are widely sharedbeliefs concerning how men and women differ in their emotion-relevantexpressive behaviour The central issue to be addressed in Study 2 therefore isthe degree of parallelism that exists between perceptions of how typical malesand females are perceived to respond to emotional events (Study 1) and self-perceptions of onersquos own emotional expressivity

To answer this question men and women drawn from the same population asin Study 1 were asked to indicate for each of the seven types of emotionsituations employed in Study 1 to what degree they expected to react themselveswith each of nine emotions if this event should happen to them In addition weasked participants to indicate the likelihood that they would show each of ninetypes of behaviours corresponding to the nine emotions of the emotion profileThese measures were embedded in a larger questionnaire that assessed beliefs

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 623

regarding emotional reactions of other social groups4 This placement made surethat the cultural beliefs and stereotypes held by the participants regardingemotional expressivity in general were evoked However the specific issue ofsex differences was not alluded to

Method

Participants A total of 360 students attending junior colleges in theMontreal urban region participated in the study Of these only thoseparticipants whose first language learned and still spoken was French whowere born in the province of Quebec (Canada) who had not lived outside ofQuebec for more than five consecutive years and who identified themselvesas either Canadian or Quebecois and not as a member of any other groupwere retained5 The resulting sample consisted of 289 individuals In total163 women and 126 men with a mean age of 1886 years participated ingroups of between 15 and 40 participants Of these 63 men and 85 womencompleted the emotion profiles and 63 men and 78 women completed thebehavioural reactions scale

Procedure Participants were informed of their right to discontinueparticipation at any time and for any reason The experimenter then distributedthe questionnaires The instructions as well as an example were provided on thefirst page The same instructions as employed in Study 1 were used the onlydifference being that participants were told to think about how they would reactand to indicate the likelihood in percent that they themselves would react witheach of the emotionsbehaviours indicated The same instructions were given forboth the emotion profile and the behavioural reactions scale with the onlydifference being that for the latter the word lsquolsquoemotionrsquorsquo was replaced withlsquolsquobehaviourrsquorsquo

Materials For each of seven emotions (happiness anger fear sadnessdisgust shame and guilt) two of the four vignettes employed in Study 1 wereretained Each participant responded to only one vignette for each emotion andvignettes were counterbalanced across participants

4 In the present context only data from the part of the questionnaire asking participants about howthey themselves would react in the described situation will be presented

5These selection criteria were included because the participants for Study 2 were recruited fromseveral Montreal junior colleges with an ethnically diverse population Emotion stereotypes are wellknown to differ between cultures (Kirouac amp Hess 1999) and the participants in Study 1 wererecruited from an ethnically homogenous population To ensure comparability between the twosamples it was therefore necessary to exclude participants from groups not present in the firstsample

624 HESS ET AL

Dependent measures

Emotion profiles These were computed in the same manner as in Study 1That is responses were averaged across the vignettes representing each specificemotion theme

Behavioural reactions scale This scale is intended to assess thebehavioural reactions that are expected for someone who is experiencing theemotional state in question To construct the scale a two-step procedure wasemployed

First 68 students of the University of Quebec at Montreal 54 women and 14men with a mean age of 279 years were asked to list for each of nineemotions (happiness serenity anger disgust fear contempt sadness shameand guilt) the behaviours and observable reactions they associate with eachspecific emotion The answers were compiled into frequency lists andsynonyms were grouped together The three most frequently namedbehaviours for each emotion were retained Due to overlap between someemotions this procedure yielded a list of 22 behaviours For the second step atotal of 44 participants 28 women and 16 men with a mean age of 226years were asked to rate for each behaviour and each of the nine emotionsthe likelihood of observing the behaviour in a person experiencing theemotion using a 7-point scale (1 very unlikely 7 very likely) Behavioursthat received a mean rating of 6 or above for only one emotion comprise thefinal scale

These consisted of the following items6 to laughto get excited (happiness)to trembleto freeze (fear) to hitto insultto criticise (anger) to cryto isolateoneself (sadness) to grimaceto vomit (disgust) to stareto look hard at(contempt) to smileto relaxto contemplate (serenity) to withdrawto loweronersquos headto blush (shame) to justify oneselfto apologise (guilt) On theprofile measure participants were asked to indicate the likelihood as apercentage that they would show each of the behaviours in a situation like theone described in the vignettes

Data analyses Each participant responded to one scenario for each of theseven emotions themes and used only one type of scale As in Study 1 thedata were collapsed over scenarios Because we had responses from morewomen than men for both dependent measures the data for the femaleparticipants were weighted to create equal cell sizes Profile analyses acrossthe nine emotional reactionsbehaviours were conducted to assess sexdifferences

6These items were translated from the original French by the authors

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 625

Results and discussion

As noted earlier the goal of Study 2 was to assess to what degree the self-perceptions of the men and women who participated in this study overlap withthe general stereotypes found in Study 1 To accomplish this the emotionprofiles from Study 1 were compared with the self-reported emotional profilesand with the behavioural reaction profiles collected here

Self-described emotion profiles The means and standard deviations for thenine scales of the emotion profiles for male and female participants arepresented in Table 3 A comparison of these means with those of the profilesfrom Study 1 reveals substantial similarities between the emotional reactionsexpected for oneself and those expected for men and women in general

Behavioral reactions Table 3 shows the means and standard deviations forthe nine behavioural reaction profiles These profiles represent the participantsself-report of the likelihood that they would display these specific behaviours inthe situations described by the vignettes As the focus of this paper is on sex

TABLE 3Means and standard deviations for self-perceptions of emotional reactionsbehaviours

for men and women (Study 2)

Men Women

Situation Mean SD Mean SD

AngerHappiness 262 1224 006 054Laughget excited 790 1826 429 1168Serenity 262 827 135 532Smilerelaxcontemplate 865 2068 435 1185Sadness 2359 2390 4405 3151Cryisolate oneself 935 2083 1825 2250Fear 603 1589 486 1070Tremblefreeze 332 814 630 1155Anger 6268 2873 6076 2928Hitinsultcriticise 3540 3042 2654 2873Disgust 1175 2447 1094 1997Grimacevomit 194 553 286 854Contempt 1865 2505 2102 2543Starelook hard at 2065 2718 1156 2216Shame 286 827 802 1887Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 1044 2187 1038 1642Guilt 349 826 491 1582Justify oneselfapologise 2045 3072 1761 2663

(Continued)

626 HESS ET AL

TABLE 3(Continued)

Men Women

Situation Mean SD Mean SD

DisgustHappiness 611 1714 143 575Laughget excited 1989 2669 915 1825Serenity 611 1855 208 1159Smilerelaxcontemplate 1159t 2113 578 1482Sadness 516 1537 490 1531Cryisolate oneself 073 403 346 1352Fear 373t 1066 911 2018Tremblefreeze 476t 1154 1015 1977Anger 1359 2146 1437 2521Hitinsultcriticise 1214 2210 1186 2151Disgust 5086 3257 5881 3178Grimacevomit 1167 2121 1692 2236Contempt 1798 2226 1750 2706Starelook hard at 1991 2362 1686 2363Shame 1023 1972 1683 2738Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 645 1663 1169 2337Guilt 262 937 119 378Justify oneselfapologise 992 2511 744 1924

SadnessHappiness 317 1280 412 1594Laughget excited 123 789 128 114Serenity 887t 2017 318 1456Smilerelaxcontemplate 621 1848 346 1196Sadness 7690 2816 8251 2258Cryisolate oneself 6008 3131 6736 3059Fear 849t 1820 1546 2637Tremblefreeze 1595 2763 1135 2068Anger 1825 2641 2261 2919Hitinsultcriticise 532 1399 641 1517Disgust 651t 2015 176 940Grimacevomit 790 2017 353 1318Contempt 659 2125 332 1121Starelook hard at 000 000 045 397Shame 214 1050 141 711Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 2008 2916 724 1680Guilt 1524 2494 2141 2985Justify oneselfapologise 315 1065 391 1478

FearHappiness 317 1487 006 054Laughget excited 203 1054 058 361Serenity 587 1698 082 327

(Continued overleaf)

627

TABLE 3(Continued)

Men Women

Situation Mean SD Mean SD

Smilerelaxcontemplate 1048 2243 182 666Sadness 2333 3051 2929 3588Cryisolate oneself 1306 2536 3022 3582Fear 5111 3207 7535 2715Tremblefreeze 2008 2565 3378 3378Anger 2468 3297 1954 2949Hitinsultcriticise 1222 2098 446 1410Disgust 787 1808 1006 2206Grimacevomit 429 1270 365 1115Contempt 1192 2216 1141 2078Starelook hard at 677 1822 391 1405Shame 143 470 200 615Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 1606 2579 1000 2117Guilt 794 2199 369 995Justify oneselfapologise 282 1263 276 1319

ShameHappiness 452 1596 144 1039Laughget excited 1825 2905 1387 1990Serenity 444 1492 182 1028Smilerelaxcontemplate 1206t 2333 623 1262Sadness 1151 2121 2077 2361Cryisolate oneself 334 877 426 1107Fear 1246 2431 1135 1700Tremblefreeze 776 1569 894 1491Anger 1262 2259 1432 2408Hitinsultcriticise 565 1478 314 1140Disgust 206 966 347 1244Grimacevomit 202 590 231 1086Contempt 730 1532 811 1880Starelook hard at 347 833 304 1160Shame 4819 3534 5968 2948Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 2563 2974 2885 2908Guilt 3095 3442 4788 3282Justify oneselfapologise 4379 3144 4256 3074

GuiltHappiness 1024 2432 355 1189Laughget excited 734 2259 584 1761Serenity 262 1008 223 771Smilerelaxcontemplate 645 1692 416 1409Sadness 2003t 2705 2971 3390Cryisolate oneself 960 1992 2273 2979Fear 1778 2667 2653 3305

(Continued)

628

differences we will not discuss these data in detail However two things arenoteworthy First both men and women report lower probabilities that theywould react with a certain behaviour for example lsquolsquoto laughto get excitedrsquorsquothan with the emotion that corresponds to the behaviour (happiness) Thisfinding is not unexpected as individuals do not always express their emotionsoutwardly or may have developed idiosyncratic means of expressing certainemotions Second the profile data for the behaviours resemble strongly theemotional reactions reported For example for anger the highest means arefound for to hitto insultto criticise for to cryto isolate one self and for to stare

TABLE 3(Continued)

Men Women

Situation Mean SD Mean SD

Tremblefreeze 1206 2212 1227 2024Anger 1762 2980 1926 2950Hitinsultcriticise 129 543 221 720Disgust 1248 2569 1152 2402Grimacevomit 581 1642 351 1385Contempt 1603 2857 1464 2611Starelook hard at 129 495 136 485Shame 2667 3227 5375 3467Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 1952 2472 1769 2333Guilt 5071 3885 5753 3372Justify oneselfapologise 4484 3581 4286 3608

HappinessHappiness 8913 1981 9106 1471Laughget excited 5763 3420 6069 3283Serenity 2738t 3650 3906 3797Smilerelaxcontemplate 5451 3445 4647 3432Sadness 127 946 020 123Cryisolate oneself 040 318 029 141Fear 103 372 206 680Tremblefreeze 419t 1313 090 057Anger 032 252 000 000Hitinsultcriticise 000 000 013 114Disgust 048 378 000 000Grimacevomit 000 000 000 000Contempt 081 522 000 000Starelook hard at 355 1392 147 388Shame 111 764 000 000Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 718 1905 687 1859Guilt 270 1526 000 000Justify oneselfapologise 355 1535 090 340

Note Significant differences between men and women tp lt 1 p lt 05 p lt 01 p lt 001

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 629

to look hard at which correspond to anger sadness and contempt reactionsrespectively

However a number of differences between these two types of profiles canalso be observed For example for the emotional reaction profiles for anger andsadness the second highest mean is found for guilt whereas for the behaviouralreaction profiles for these emotions the second highest mean is found for shamebehaviours (to withdrawto lower onersquos headto blush) This findings may be dueto the general confusion between shame and guilt that has been observed forWestern cultures (see eg Wallbott amp Scherer 1994)

Sex differences To assess whether male and female participants differedwith regard to their expected emotional reactions and behaviours in the differentemotion eliciting situations profile analyses were conducted on the ratings foreach emotion situation All analyses and post-hoc tests were conducted at analpha level of 05 The results are shown in Table 4

TABLE 4Results of profile analyses on self-reported likelihood

of emotional reactionsbehaviours for men andwomen (Study 2)

Vignettes F df p

AngerReactions 295 8116 005Behaviours 183 8113 079

DisgustReactions 169 8115 107Behaviours 173 8116 099

FearReactions 330 8116 002Behaviours 390 8116 001

SadnessReactions 207 8116 044Behaviours 170 8115 105

GuiltReactions 186 8117 071Behaviours 130 8115 251

ShameReactions 215 8116 037Behaviours 70 8116 689

HappinessReactions 106 8116 397Behaviours 109 8116 376

630 HESS ET AL

Emotional reactions For all emotion situations except disgust andhappiness the emotional reactions profiles were nonparallel or marginallynonparallel (see Table 4) For the nonparallel profiles post-hoc tests revealedthat a similar pattern of sex differences emerged across the different emotionthemes For happiness and serenity there were either no significant differencesbetween men and women or men reported experiencing these emotions with ahigher probability than did women Conversely for sadness fear shame andguilt there were either no significant sex differences or women reported feelingthese emotions with a higher probability than did men For anger disgust andcontempt reactions no significant differences emerged

Emotional behaviour profiles Only the fear profile was significantlynonparallel (different) for men and women The profiles for anger and disgustwere marginally nonparallel and the remaining profiles were all parallel andcoincident Thus fewer significant differences between menrsquos and womenrsquosexpected behaviours in the situations described by the vignettes were found thanwas the case for the expected emotional reactions in Studies 1 and 2 Yet it isimportant to note that the probabilities reported for the behavioural profiles werelower overall and it is thus possible that this lack of differences is due to a lackof sensitivity of the measure

As postulated based on previous research (eg Crawford Clippax OnyxGault amp Benton 1992) as well as on the emotional reactions profile womenreport a higher probability of either crying or isolating oneself in an angersituation than do men Conversely and in accordance with both the literature onanger expression (see earlier) and the results from the emotional reactionsprofile men report it more likely to hitto insultto criticise than women thoughthis difference is not significant In addition they report that they aresignificantly more likely to stareto look hard (contempt) than do women abehaviour that could also be interpreted as aggressive when shown in responseto an insult

As regards the disgust situations men report that they are more likely tolaughto get excited This sex difference matches the finding for the emotionalreactions profile but was not found in Study 1 Finally for the fear situation menreport that they are more likely to hitto insultto criticise as well as to smiletorelaxto contemplate (serenity) than do women The emotional reactions profilefor fear from this study shows that men report a higher probability of reactingwith serenity but not with anger than do women As these behaviourscorrespond to a macho or cool demeanour in a threatening situation they fit thegeneral stereotype of masculine behaviour Conversely women report to bemore likely to trembleto freeze as well as to cryto isolate one self in fearsituations

In sum although many fewer sex differences reached significance whencomparing self-reported expected behaviours for men and women the pattern of

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 631

results is largely congruent with previous findings Specifically women reporteda higher probability of showing behaviours congruent with sadness and fear thandid men whereas men reported higher probabilities for anger and serenebehaviours In addition men reported a higher probability of showing acontempt behaviour in an anger situation yet the relevant behaviour (to staretolook hard) could be interpreted as aggressive in that context

How congruent are the findings fromStudies 1 and 2

As mentioned earlier not all significant differences found in Study 1 for theexpected reactions for men and women in general were also found for self-reports of expected reactions by men and women for themselves Yet as theresults for the two studies are based on different degrees of freedomsignificance levels cannot be directly compared To assess whether stereotypicaland self-reported sex differences were of similar magnitude we computed theeffect sizes for both studies Table 5 shows Cohenrsquos d for the post-hoc

TABLE 5Cohenrsquos d for sex differences in Studies 1 and 2

Study 1 Study 2

SituationEmotionalreactions

Emotionalreactions

Emotionalbehaviours

AngerHappiness 7023Serenity 7025Sadness 203 073 041Fear 123 030Anger 7055 7030Disgust 068Contempt 7026Shame 117 7035Guilt 129

DisgustHappiness 7032 7037 7047Serenity 7045 7026 7021Sadness 095 027Fear 189 033 033AngerDisgust 160 024 024Contempt 050Shame 062 7028 026Guilt 062 020

(Continued)

632 HESS ET AL

TABLE 5(Continued)

Study 1 Study 2

SituationEmotionalreactions

Emotionalreactions

Emotionalbehaviours

SadnessHappiness 7053Serenity 7032Sadness 184 022 024Fear 171 031Anger 7065 042Disgust 7030 7025Contempt 021Shame 020 7046 054Guilt 176 022 7033

FearHappiness 7021 7030Serenity 7026 7041 7052Sadness 189 055Fear 221 082 046Anger 7084 7043Disgust 067ContemptShame 049 7026Guilt 172 7025

ShameHappiness 7045 7023Serenity 7027 7020 7031Sadness 175 041Fear 128Anger 7069Disgust 065Contempt 054Shame 154 035Guilt 153 050

GuiltHappiness 7107 7035Serenity 7051Sadness 198 032 051Fear 162 029AngerDisgust 128Contempt 075Shame 178 051Guilt 183 020

633

comparisons for each emotion in the profile for the six negative emotionsituations across the two studies For Study 1 the effect sizes for the urban andthe rural sample were combined To facilitate the reading of the table onlydifferences for which d was at least 020 (ie equivalent to a small effect) areshown In general effect sizes for Study 1 are larger than those for Study 2 Foremotional reactions the expected differences between men and women were ofmedium (gt 050) to large (gt 080) size whereas for self-perceptions the expecteddifferences between men and women were small to medium in size

The most stable sex difference across the two studies was found for sadnessboth as a core emotion in sadness vignettes and as a secondary emotion That isfor all negative emotions the general stereotype describes women as reactingwith more sadness and women also perceive themselves as reacting with moresadness andor report more sadness behaviours Further women are expected toreact with (and they self-report) more shame and guilt reactionsbehaviours inshame and guilt situations However for the other negative emotions (angerdisgust sadness and fear) men report higher levels of shame reactions or shamebehaviours (but not both) Finally fear reactions and behaviours are described asmore likely for women in general and women perceive themselves as reactingwith more fear in disgust sadness fear and guilt situations

Another very stable sex difference across studies regards happiness andserenity reactions for negative emotion vignettes Men consistently are bothexpected to react with and self-report more happiness reactions as well ashappiness behaviours for disgust fear and shame vignettes To a lesser degreethis pattern also emerges for sadness and guilt vignettes As mentioned in thediscussion of Study 1 this may reflect differences in the value structure betweenmen and women

In sum a comparison of effect sizes shows considerable consistency acrossthe two studies Specifically noteworthy is the very consistent finding for boththe stereotypical beliefs and the self-reports with regard to sadness reactionswhich are considered as more likely for women than for men for all negativeemotion situations studied

However a number of differences between the general stereotypes and theself-perceptions also emerged specifically with regard to shame reactionsWhereas women are generally believed to be more likely to react with shameto negative emotion events the self-reported likelihood for shame as aconcomitant emotion is higher for men for all situations except for guilt(given the general confusion regarding these states observed in Westerncultures this may be due to shame being a core rather than a concomitantemotion for guilt scenarios) Yet self-reported shame behaviours are morelikely for women than for men in sadness and disgust situations A possibleexplanation is that men are actively trying to not show shame reactionsmdashtoconform to the general stereotypemdashbut are aware that they nonetheless arelikely to feel shame in those situations

634 HESS ET AL

To conclude the general stereotype and self-perceptions of emotionalreactions and behaviours suggest that women react with more sadness to all typesof negative emotion events Further the stereotypes and the self-perceptions arein agreement on menrsquos greater likelihood to react with happiness and serenity to avariety of negative emotions In contrast differences between the generalstereotypes and self-perceptions emerge for shame reactions with men reportingin situations when shame is a secondary emotion a higher likelihood of shamereactions but not necessarily shame behaviours than do women

STUDY 3

The results from Study 2 suggest that the stereotypical beliefs regarding menrsquosand womenrsquos emotional reactions and behaviours in a variety of emotion-inducing situations converge with self-perceptions of menrsquos and womenrsquosemotional reactions and behaviours in those same situations This finding isconsistent with the notion that autobiographic statements that requireparticipants to summarise over a number of related experiences may be biasedby stereotypical expectations (see eg Feldman-Barrett et al 1998) This leadsto the question of whether a similar overlap can also be found for narratives ofsingle specific emotional events from the participantsrsquo past If stereotypesindeed influence the way emotional events are reconstructed in a narrative wewould expect to find that women report more sadness events and express moresadness overall as well as more intense target emotions for all but anger eventsConversely we would expect men to report more situations involving anger aswell as experiencing more happiness and serenity overall

However as Study 3 is based on personal narratives and not on standardisedvignettes such a finding could simply be due to the fact that the emotionantecedent events in a real-life setting differ for men and women To assess thispossibility we decided to measure the emotion antecedent events by means of anappraisal questionnaire that assesses the participantsrsquo perception of the emotionantecedent situation To the degree that perceptions of emotion antecedents aresimilar for men and women while reported emotional reactions differ we canconclude that observed sex differences are not due to differences in theperception of the event per se For example if womenrsquos tendency to report moresadness were due to a difference in the perception of the emotion antecedentsituation we would expect women to report more often that they did not feel thatthey could do anything to change the situation or that they had to adapt to thesituation (as sadness is generally associated with the notion of irrevocable loss)

Overview

For this study we translated and adapted a questionnaire reported by Scherer(1988) that consists of two parts The first part invites the participants todescribe an event during which they experienced an emotion The second part

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 635

asks specific questions regarding the appraisal process We added a section inwhich we asked participants to complete an emotion profile for the event Toavoid the possibility that men and women would relate narratives from widelydifferent types of situations we asked participants to describe an event related tofamily interactions This class of situations should be readily accessible to allparticipants and ensure that emotional events involving human interactionpartners were reported

Allowing participants to choose the type of emotional events they report hasseveral advantages Most importantly we can assess what type of emotionalevents men and women choose to report spontaneously It also permitsparticipants to choose a salient event for which they can recollect theinformation necessary to respond to the appraisal questions On the other handthis approach is unlikely to result in a well-balanced distribution of emotiontopics thus making it difficult or impossible to analyse the data separately fordifferent emotion themes Yet in the context of the present study we were onlyinterested in sex differences in reports and not in absolute levels of responsesStudies 1 and 2 suggest that sex differences are very stable across all negativeemotions We therefore decided to allow participants to choose the emotiontheme and analysed the data collapsed across all negative emotion themes

Method

Participants A total of 171 students 87 men and 84 women with a meanage of 1862 years participated in this study Most of the participants (147) wererecruited from an ethnically homogenous junior college in the larger Montrealurban area (Cegep Lionel-Groulx Ste-Therese Quebec Canada) and partici-pated in groups An additional 24 participants were recruited individually

Procedure The experimenter explained that the study concerned emotionalevents in peoplersquos lives Participants were informed of their right to discontinueparticipation at any time and for any reason The experimenter then distributedthe questionnaires and responded to questions regarding the procedure The tasktook between 10 and 30 minutes Most of this time difference can be attributedto the amount of detail provided in the event description that ranged from acouple of words (eg birth of my daughter) to well over a page

Dependent measures The questionnaire consisted of four parts The firstpart was an open-ended question asking the participants to describe any eventinvolving their family life that led them to experience an emotion Sadnessshame anger guilt joy fear and disgust were provided as examples ofemotions Participants were asked to give a detailed description of the situationincluding the events that led up to it their reactions and those of others presentIn addition they were asked to identify the people involved with respect to their

636 HESS ET AL

relationship with them (eg my partner my sister etc) as well as to identify themain emotion theme of the story This served to ensure that the participantsbased their answers to the following questions on a specific event and not on aclass of similar events

Emotion description The second part of the questionnaire consisted ofquestions regarding when the event happened for how long they felt theemotion and the intensity of the core emotion identified as the emotion theme ofthe story Participants were also asked to indicate whether they tried to hide orcontrol their feelings and to what degree This part also contained the emotionprofile used in Studies 1 and 2 Using this measure participants were asked toindicate to what percentage they had felt each of the nine emotions from theprofile

Appraisal questionnaire A series of questions regarding the appraisal processwere used to assess the emotion antecedent events These questions weretranslated from the questionnaire reported by Scherer (1988) Specificallyparticipants were asked to what degree they had expected the situation to occurhow pleasant or unpleasant they considered the event whether the event helpedor hindered them in achieving their aims to what degree they considered that thesituation or the event that caused the emotion was unjust or unfair whether theevent was caused by their own or by someone elsersquos behaviour to what degreethey considered that the behaviour that caused the event would be judged asimproper or immoral by their acquaintances how the event affected theirfeelings about themselves such as their self-esteem or self-confidence andfinally to what degree the event changed their relationships with the peopleinvolved (all on negative-positive 7-point bipolar scales)

In addition participants were given a list of 11 specific potential causes of theevent (caused it myself natural causes act of god etc) They also evaluatedtheir ability to act upon or to cope with the event and its consequences using ascale involving 5 options The last part of the questionnaire consisted ofquestions regarding the participantsrsquo sex their age and whether they werecurrently seeing someone in a love-based relationship and if so for how long

Results

Of the 171 reported emotion events 147 (74 reported by men and 73 reported bywomen) concerned negative emotional events Of these a total of 62 weresadness events 22 were anger events and 11 were guilt events The remainingevents were distributed over a large number of negative emotions

As expected the very low frequency of reports for specific emotion themesmade separate analyses of reports of these events unfeasible We thereforedecided to perform analyses on the data summed over all negative emotionthemes The 24 events with positive emotion themes were obviously excludedfrom these analyses

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 637

Do women report more sadness events and men more anger events Toaddress this question a chi-square test was performed on the frequency withwhich men and women labeled the reported event as a sad versus an anger eventIn line with the results of Studies 1 and 2 we found men to report more angerevents and women to report more sadness events Specifically 14 men and 8women reported anger events and 25 men and 37 women reported sad events w2

= 355 p = 06 d = 42Do women report more intense core emotions than men For the intensity of

the core emotion experienced during the event women reported significantlyhigher levels (M = 593 SD = 101) than men (M = 554 SD = 123) t(145) =222 p = 028 d = 37

Do women and men report different levels of negative emotions across theemotion profile Figure 2 presents the emotion profiles separately for men andwomen An inspection of the profiles shows that overall men report morehappinessserenity whereas women report higher levels of all other emotionsThe profiles are nonparallel F(8 137) = 5877 p lt 001 Post-hoc analysesrevealed a significant sex difference in self-reported sadness with womenreporting higher levels than men To compare the sex differences in the profiles

Figure 2 Emotion profile for menrsquos and womenrsquos self-reported emotional reactions to negativeemotion events (Study 3)

638 HESS ET AL

found in this study with those from Studies 1 and 2 effect sizes were calculatedUsing the same cut-off point as previously (small effect size d = 020) only twodifferences were found to be stable across the three studies Men report higherlevels of happiness for negative emotion events (d = 7022) and women reporthigher levels of sadness (d = 043) As the latter difference may be due to thehigher frequency of reported sadness events by women we also verified whetherwomen report higher levels of sadness when sadness events are excluded fromthe analysis An inspection of the means revealed a marginally significantdifference in the same direction M = 6472 SD = 3247 and M = 5108 SD =3684 for women and men respectively t(83) = 181 p = 074 d = 40

Are there differences in appraisal patterns between men and women Asmentioned earlier the reported differences in emotional reactions could be dueto differences in the perception of the emotion antecedent events Yet nodifferences in appraisal patterns were found suggesting that emotion antecedentevents were perceived similarly In addition despite the more frequent and moreintense reports of sadness women did not report different coping styles thanmen and did not seem to feel more helpless (38 men vs 34 women report thisreaction) In fact women more frequently report that they felt able to lsquolsquoinfluencethe situation positivelyrsquorsquo (19 women vs 9 men report this reaction though thedifference is not significant)

Discussion

Study 3 extended the study of emotion stereotypes and self-perceptions based onvignettes to narratives of emotional events that the participants had in factexperienced themselves The goal of the study was to investigate whether thefindings from Studies 1 and 2 generalise to such recollections of personal eventsThe results strongly suggest this to be the case Women again report higherlevels of sadness for negative emotion events They also report more sad eventsin general Men on the other hand report more anger events as well as morehappiness for negative emotion events as was found in both Studies 1 and 2 Yetno reported differences in appraisal or coping emerged This suggests that theobserved differences in emotional reactions are not due to a bias in the appraisalprocess nor to an inability to act upon the event

If emotion antecedents do not differ why are differences in emotionalreactions reported We suggest that such differences represent an influence ofthe general emotion stereotype on the narrative reconstruction of a personalevent This conclusion is based on the observation of a null effect and thus opento the critique that the present study lacked the power necessary to detect realdifferences in appraisal between men and women To assess this critique wecalculated the absolute mean effect size for the interval-scaled appraisalquestions to be d = 015 To achieve 80 power a sample of 1100 participantswould be needed These data underscore the very slim differences in appraisals

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 639

between men and women making it highly unlikely that the effects observed inthis study are mediated by a difference in appraisal and thus by a difference inthe perception of the underlying event

CONCLUSIONS

The present series of studies had the goal to assess general emotion stereotypesand their influence on self-perceptions of emotional reactions by men andwomen We wanted to both describe these stereotypes in more detail with regardnot only to the modal emotion for a specific event (such as sadness reactions to aloss) but also with regard to the secondary emotions present in these situationsFurther we wanted to assess to what degree such expectations for men andwomen in general are endorsed by individuals for themselves as well as whetherthey would be spontaneously reported when relating a personally experiencedevent

Two gender differences were found to be stable across all three experimentalparadigms Women are expected to be more likely to react with sadness in allnegative emotion situations they expect themselves to be more likely to reactwith sadness as well as to cry and to withdraw more and finally women reportmore sadness in personal events In contrast men are expected to react withmore happinessserenity during negative emotional situations they expectthemselves to react more frequently this way as well as to laugh and smile moreand to be more relaxed They also tend to report more happiness whendescribing negative personal events

Not all general emotion stereotypes were found in the self-perceptionsstudied in Studies 2 and 3 Specifically according to Study 1 women areexpected to be more likely to react with shame and guilt in all negative emotionsituations Yet women did not expect to do so for themselves in situations otherthan shame and guilt situations and in fact men reported to be more likely toreact with shame in a variety of situations Further men and women did notreport any differences with regard to experiences of shame and guilt during thepersonal events

Study 3 included an appraisal questionnaire to address the question whetherthe self-reported differences in emotionality between men and women are due todifferences in the appraisal of the emotion antecedent events or rather to theinfluence of the prevalent norms No differences in appraisals were detectedsuggesting that the self-reported differences may be due to the normative forcesof the general stereotype rather than to appraisal differences

It may be argued that the Study 3 is based on recollections of past events andthat self-reports of emotional experiences represent after the fact reconstructionsthat differ from the actually experienced emotions during the event (seeParkinson amp Manstead 1993) A related argument may be made for Study 2where participants had to estimate the likelihood of their emotional reactions to

640 HESS ET AL

hypothetical events (even though the latter were chosen to be common everydayevents) This may well be true Yet the question remains why did men andwomen reconstruct the events differently in terms of their emotional reactionsThe answer would then be that the prevalent emotion stereotype which islargely endorsed by the population studied influenced this reconstruction Yetas peoplesrsquo sense of self depends on their past histories this would imply thatreconstructions of emotional events in line with emotion stereotypes mayeventually lead individuals to conform more closely to these stereotypes as theybecome more and more part of their emotional history and eventually of theiremotional self

Manuscript received 30 May 1997Revised manuscript received 23 February 2000

REFERENCES

Adams S Kuebli J Boyle PA amp Fivush R (1995) Gender differences in parent-childconversations about past emotions A longitudinal investigation Sex Roles 33 309ndash323

Allen JG amp Haccoun DM (1976) Sex differences in emotionality A multidimensional approachHuman Relations 29 711ndash722

Averill JR (1997) The emotions An integrative approach In R Hogan JA Johnson amp SRBriggs (Eds) Handbook of personality psychology (pp 513ndash541) San Diego CA AcademicPress

Birnbaum DW (1983) Preschoolersrsquo stereotypes about sex differences in emotionality Areaffirmation Journal of Genetic Psychology 143 139ndash140

Briton NJ amp Hall JA (1995) Gender-based expectancies and observer judgements of smilingJournal of Nonverbal Behavior 19 49ndash65

Brody LR amp Hall JA (1993) Gender and emotion In M Lewis amp JM Haviland (Eds)Handbook of emotions (pp 447-460) New York Guilford Press

Crawford J Clippax S Onyx J Gault U amp Benton P (1992) Emotion and genderConstructing meaning from memory London Sage

Dunn J Bretherton I amp Munn P (1987) Conversations about feeling states between mothers andtheir children Developmental Psychology 23 132ndash139

Eagly AH amp Mladinic A (1989) Gender stereotypes and attitudes toward women and menPersonality and Social Psychology Bulletin 15 543ndash558

Ekman P amp Friesen W (1986) A new pan-cultural facial expression of emotion Motivation andEmotion 10 159ndash168

Feldman-Barrett L Robin L Pietromonaco PR amp Eysell KM (1998) Are women the moreemotional sex Evidence from emotional experiences in social context Cognition and Emotion12 555ndash578

Fernandez-Dols J-M amp Ruiz-Belda M-A (1995) Are smiles a sign of happiness Gold medalwinners at the Olympic Games Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 69 1113ndash1119

Fischer A (1993) Sex differences in emotionality Fact or stereotype Feminism and Psychology 3303ndash318

Fivush R (1989) Exploring differences in the emotional content of mother child conversationsabout the past Sex Roles 20 675ndash691

Frank MG amp Ekman P (1993) Not all smiles are created equal The differences betweenenjoyment and nonenjoymen t smiles [Special Issue Current issues in psychological humorresearch] Humor International Journal of Humor Research 6 9ndash26

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 641

Gallois C (1994) Group membership social rules and power A social psychologica l perspectiveon emotional communication Journal of Pragmatics 22 301ndash324

Hall JA (1984) Nonverbal sex differences Communication accuracy and expressive styleBaltimore MD Johns Hopkins University Press

Izard C (1972) Patterns of emotions A new analysis of anxiety and depression New YorkAcademic Press

Jussim L Milbourn M amp Nelson W (1991) Emotional openness Sex-role stereotypes and self-perceptions Representative Research in Social Psychology 19 35ndash52

Kirouac G amp Hess U (1999) Group membership and the decoding of nonverbal behavior In PPhilippot R Feldman amp E Coats (Eds) The social context of nonverbal behavior (pp 182ndash210) New York Cambridge University Press

Kring AM amp Gordon AH (1998) Sex differences in emotion Expression experience andphysiology Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74 686ndash703

LaFrance M amp Banaji M (1992) Toward a reconsideration of the gender-emotion relationship InMS Clark (Ed) Emotion and social behavior Review of personality and social psychology(Vol 14 pp 178ndash201) Newbury Park CA Sage

LaFrance M amp Hecht MA (1995) Why smiles generate leniency Personality and SocialPsychology Bulletin 21 207ndash214

Lazarus RS (1991) Emotion and adaptation Oxford UK Oxford University PressParkinson B amp Manstead ASR (1993) Making sense of emotion in stories and social life

Cognition and Emotion 7 295ndash323Plutchik R (1980) Emotion A psychoevolutionar y synthesis New York Harper amp RowRime B Mesquita B Philippot P amp Boca S (1991) Beyond the emotional event Six studies on

the social sharing of emotion Cognition and Emotion 5 435ndash465Scherer KR (1988) Appendix C Questionnaire used in the International Survey on Emotion

Antecedents and Reactions (ISEAR) In KR Scherer (Ed) Facets of emotion Recent researchHillsdale NJ Erlbaum

Sherman JW amp Bessenhoff GR (1999) Stereotypes as source monitoring cues On theinteraction between episodic and semantic memory Psychological Science 10 106ndash110

Stoppard JM amp Gruchy CD (1993) Gender context and expression of positive emotionPersonality and Social Psychology Bulletin 19 143ndash150

Tucker JS amp Riggio RE (1988) The role of social skills in encoding posed and spontaneousfacial expressions Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 12 87ndash97

Wallbott HG amp Scherer KR (1994) Cultural determinants in experiencing shame and guilt InJune Price Tangney amp Kurt W Fischer (Eds) Self conscious emotions The psychology of shameand guilt embarrasment and pride (pp 465ndash487) New York Guilford Press

642 HESS ET AL

(a)

(b)

Figure 1 Emotion profiles for menrsquos and womenrsquos expected emotional reaction as a function ofemotion theme (Study 1)

(Continued overleaf)

617

(c)

(d)

Figure 1 (Continued)

618

(e)

(f)

Figure 1 (Continued) (Continued overleaf)

619

In general the same differences between menrsquos and womenrsquos expectedemotional reactions were found for all negative emotion vignettes Regardless ofthe central emotion theme of the vignettes univariate post-hoc tests on theparticipantsrsquo ratings of expected anger happiness and serenity either revealedno differences in expected reactions between men and women or they revealedthat a higher percentage of men than women were expected to react with theseemotion displays Men were judged to be significantly more likely to expressanger in sadness anger shame and fear situations Further men were judged tobe significantly more likely than women to express happiness in guilt shameand sadness situations and to express serenity in guilt situations

On the other hand a different pattern emerged for participantsrsquo ratings ofexpected sadness fear disgust contempt shame and guilt For these emotionalreactions differences emerged for almost all negative emotion situations and inall cases women were expected to be more likely to react with these emotionsthan were men Specifically univariate post-hoc analyses revealed that womenwere judged to be significantly more likely to react with sadness fear and guiltin all emotion-relevant situations Further women were judged to besignificantly more likely to react with disgust and shame in all emotionsituations except for sadness situations Finally women were judged to besignificantly more likely than men to react with contempt in disgust guilt and

(g)

Figure 1 (Continued)

620 HESS ET AL

shame situations For happiness the profiles for both genders were parallel andcoincident suggesting that raters not only expected the same pattern of reactionsfrom men and women but also at the same level for each emotion

Discussion

In summary the analyses of the emotion profiles suggest the presence of clearexpectancies regarding not only the core emotion for a given type of situationbut also for the secondary emotional reactions that are expected in the situationAlthough the profiles for men and women are relatively similar with regard totheir major features a number of systematic differences in expectationsregarding menrsquos and womenrsquos emotional reactions emerged for the negativeemotion events but not for the positive

This latter finding is in contrast to the literature on the self-reportedfrequency of happiness expressionsexperiences in men and women (eg Allenamp Haccoun 1976) and with the finding that women are both believed and

TABLE 2Results of profile analyses on expected emotionalreactions for men and women in general (Study 1)

Vignettes F df p

AngerUrban 532 8175 001Rural 333 8169 001

DisgustUrban 507 8175 001Rural 461 8169 001

FearUrban 689 8187 001Rural 294 8163 004

SadnessUrban 489 8187 001Rural 267 8163 009

GuiltUrban 414 8173 001Rural 288 8167 005

ShameUrban 277 8173 007Rural 156 8167 140 (ns)

HappinessUrban 174 8273 090 (ns)Rural 127 8255 257 (ns)

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 621

observed to smile more than men (Briton amp Hall 1995) However given themultiple functions of smiles (see eg Fernandez-Dols amp Ruiz-Belda 1995Frank amp Ekman 1993 LaFrance amp Hecht 1995) differences in smiling may notreflect differences in happiness One explanation for this lack of continuity withthe existing literature is that the results of the present study are based on specificvignettes and not on global recollections Thus possible differences in real-world exposure to happiness-eliciting situations are less likely to influence ourfindings than they are to influence more global assessments

For all negative emotion events the profiles were nonparallel3 that is theratings revealed different expectations for men and women The differences areconsistent with the notion that the gender stereotype for emotional expressivenessdoes not assume women to be more expressive for all emotions For examplewomen are not expected to express more disgust and shame in sadness situationsthan are men Also women are expected to react with more contempt than aremen only in disgust guilt and shame situations while for all other situations nodifferences emerge However women are thought to express more sadness fearshame and guilt for all emotion-eliciting situations except for happiness eventsThat is regardless of the emotion theme prevalent in the vignettes women arealways expected to react with more sadness fear shame and guilt

An interesting case regards happiness as a secondary emotion in situationswith a negative core emotion The data reveal that men are typically expected toexperience more happiness in these situations than are women The differencesare strongest for guilt and shame vignettes which involve notions of cheatingand public misbehaviour and might reflect a difference in value structureinherent in the gender stereotype

In sum the results of Study 1 expand our knowledge regarding genderdifferences in emotion stereotypes by considering secondary emotionalresponses as well as modal emotional responses Specifically women are notonly expected to react with more sadness fear shame and guilt in situations forwhich these emotions are central but are expected to do so in all situationsinvolving negative affect Men on the other hand are expected to react withmore anger in a wide variety of situations involving negative affect as well aswith more happiness in some situations involving negative affect This suggeststhat the prevalent emotion stereotype describes womenrsquos predominant emotionalreactions to be more withdrawing (fear and sadness) and self-directed (shameand guilt) whereas menrsquos emotional reactions are seen as more active andaggressive

But to what degree are these general stereotypesexpectations reflected inthe self-perceptions that people have of their own emotional reactions AsJussim et alrsquos (1991) findings show self-perceptions can diverge from thecultural stereotypes Yet Jussim et al also suggest that over time these

3An exception are the shame profiles for the rural sample

622 HESS ET AL

stereotypical beliefs may act as a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy and moveself-perceptions in the direction of being consistent with the stereotype Alsoit is possible that widely held cultural beliefs become prescriptive and thuslead individuals to describe their own behaviour as being in accordance withthe stereotype Gallois (1994) in a review of emotion communication ininterpersonal situations concludes that emotion communication in suchsituations is highly rule-governed A similar perspective underlies Averillrsquos(1997) argument regarding the notion of emotion roles that have entrancerequirements such that for example a successful display of anger presupposessufficient power to adequately address the anger eliciting issue AlsoStoppard and Gruchy (1993) found that individuals anticipate costs andrewards for showing certain emotions in certain contexts Specifically womenexpect more costs when not expressing positive emotions in an lsquolsquootherrsquorsquo-oriented context whereas men expect rewards for showing positive emotionsregardless of context

Taken together these findings from diverse domains suggest that self-perceptions of emotional reactions should show a clear overlap withstereotypical expectations within any particular culture To the degree that weassume that these influences are due to recollection biases we may furtherspeculate that the overlap is less pronounced when asking about behaviouralreactions in particular social contexts than when asking for reactions inlsquolsquogeneralrsquorsquo or independent of a specific social situation Specifically as data onactual behaviour suggest relatively few sex differences in emotional behaviourwhereas the stereotype suggests a wide range of such differences differences inself-perceptions are more likely to be due to the influence of the culturalstereotypes than to actual behavioural differences between the genders Study 2is focused on an analysis of this possibility

STUDY 2

Study 1 confirmed that at least in the Quebec culture there are widely sharedbeliefs concerning how men and women differ in their emotion-relevantexpressive behaviour The central issue to be addressed in Study 2 therefore isthe degree of parallelism that exists between perceptions of how typical malesand females are perceived to respond to emotional events (Study 1) and self-perceptions of onersquos own emotional expressivity

To answer this question men and women drawn from the same population asin Study 1 were asked to indicate for each of the seven types of emotionsituations employed in Study 1 to what degree they expected to react themselveswith each of nine emotions if this event should happen to them In addition weasked participants to indicate the likelihood that they would show each of ninetypes of behaviours corresponding to the nine emotions of the emotion profileThese measures were embedded in a larger questionnaire that assessed beliefs

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 623

regarding emotional reactions of other social groups4 This placement made surethat the cultural beliefs and stereotypes held by the participants regardingemotional expressivity in general were evoked However the specific issue ofsex differences was not alluded to

Method

Participants A total of 360 students attending junior colleges in theMontreal urban region participated in the study Of these only thoseparticipants whose first language learned and still spoken was French whowere born in the province of Quebec (Canada) who had not lived outside ofQuebec for more than five consecutive years and who identified themselvesas either Canadian or Quebecois and not as a member of any other groupwere retained5 The resulting sample consisted of 289 individuals In total163 women and 126 men with a mean age of 1886 years participated ingroups of between 15 and 40 participants Of these 63 men and 85 womencompleted the emotion profiles and 63 men and 78 women completed thebehavioural reactions scale

Procedure Participants were informed of their right to discontinueparticipation at any time and for any reason The experimenter then distributedthe questionnaires The instructions as well as an example were provided on thefirst page The same instructions as employed in Study 1 were used the onlydifference being that participants were told to think about how they would reactand to indicate the likelihood in percent that they themselves would react witheach of the emotionsbehaviours indicated The same instructions were given forboth the emotion profile and the behavioural reactions scale with the onlydifference being that for the latter the word lsquolsquoemotionrsquorsquo was replaced withlsquolsquobehaviourrsquorsquo

Materials For each of seven emotions (happiness anger fear sadnessdisgust shame and guilt) two of the four vignettes employed in Study 1 wereretained Each participant responded to only one vignette for each emotion andvignettes were counterbalanced across participants

4 In the present context only data from the part of the questionnaire asking participants about howthey themselves would react in the described situation will be presented

5These selection criteria were included because the participants for Study 2 were recruited fromseveral Montreal junior colleges with an ethnically diverse population Emotion stereotypes are wellknown to differ between cultures (Kirouac amp Hess 1999) and the participants in Study 1 wererecruited from an ethnically homogenous population To ensure comparability between the twosamples it was therefore necessary to exclude participants from groups not present in the firstsample

624 HESS ET AL

Dependent measures

Emotion profiles These were computed in the same manner as in Study 1That is responses were averaged across the vignettes representing each specificemotion theme

Behavioural reactions scale This scale is intended to assess thebehavioural reactions that are expected for someone who is experiencing theemotional state in question To construct the scale a two-step procedure wasemployed

First 68 students of the University of Quebec at Montreal 54 women and 14men with a mean age of 279 years were asked to list for each of nineemotions (happiness serenity anger disgust fear contempt sadness shameand guilt) the behaviours and observable reactions they associate with eachspecific emotion The answers were compiled into frequency lists andsynonyms were grouped together The three most frequently namedbehaviours for each emotion were retained Due to overlap between someemotions this procedure yielded a list of 22 behaviours For the second step atotal of 44 participants 28 women and 16 men with a mean age of 226years were asked to rate for each behaviour and each of the nine emotionsthe likelihood of observing the behaviour in a person experiencing theemotion using a 7-point scale (1 very unlikely 7 very likely) Behavioursthat received a mean rating of 6 or above for only one emotion comprise thefinal scale

These consisted of the following items6 to laughto get excited (happiness)to trembleto freeze (fear) to hitto insultto criticise (anger) to cryto isolateoneself (sadness) to grimaceto vomit (disgust) to stareto look hard at(contempt) to smileto relaxto contemplate (serenity) to withdrawto loweronersquos headto blush (shame) to justify oneselfto apologise (guilt) On theprofile measure participants were asked to indicate the likelihood as apercentage that they would show each of the behaviours in a situation like theone described in the vignettes

Data analyses Each participant responded to one scenario for each of theseven emotions themes and used only one type of scale As in Study 1 thedata were collapsed over scenarios Because we had responses from morewomen than men for both dependent measures the data for the femaleparticipants were weighted to create equal cell sizes Profile analyses acrossthe nine emotional reactionsbehaviours were conducted to assess sexdifferences

6These items were translated from the original French by the authors

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 625

Results and discussion

As noted earlier the goal of Study 2 was to assess to what degree the self-perceptions of the men and women who participated in this study overlap withthe general stereotypes found in Study 1 To accomplish this the emotionprofiles from Study 1 were compared with the self-reported emotional profilesand with the behavioural reaction profiles collected here

Self-described emotion profiles The means and standard deviations for thenine scales of the emotion profiles for male and female participants arepresented in Table 3 A comparison of these means with those of the profilesfrom Study 1 reveals substantial similarities between the emotional reactionsexpected for oneself and those expected for men and women in general

Behavioral reactions Table 3 shows the means and standard deviations forthe nine behavioural reaction profiles These profiles represent the participantsself-report of the likelihood that they would display these specific behaviours inthe situations described by the vignettes As the focus of this paper is on sex

TABLE 3Means and standard deviations for self-perceptions of emotional reactionsbehaviours

for men and women (Study 2)

Men Women

Situation Mean SD Mean SD

AngerHappiness 262 1224 006 054Laughget excited 790 1826 429 1168Serenity 262 827 135 532Smilerelaxcontemplate 865 2068 435 1185Sadness 2359 2390 4405 3151Cryisolate oneself 935 2083 1825 2250Fear 603 1589 486 1070Tremblefreeze 332 814 630 1155Anger 6268 2873 6076 2928Hitinsultcriticise 3540 3042 2654 2873Disgust 1175 2447 1094 1997Grimacevomit 194 553 286 854Contempt 1865 2505 2102 2543Starelook hard at 2065 2718 1156 2216Shame 286 827 802 1887Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 1044 2187 1038 1642Guilt 349 826 491 1582Justify oneselfapologise 2045 3072 1761 2663

(Continued)

626 HESS ET AL

TABLE 3(Continued)

Men Women

Situation Mean SD Mean SD

DisgustHappiness 611 1714 143 575Laughget excited 1989 2669 915 1825Serenity 611 1855 208 1159Smilerelaxcontemplate 1159t 2113 578 1482Sadness 516 1537 490 1531Cryisolate oneself 073 403 346 1352Fear 373t 1066 911 2018Tremblefreeze 476t 1154 1015 1977Anger 1359 2146 1437 2521Hitinsultcriticise 1214 2210 1186 2151Disgust 5086 3257 5881 3178Grimacevomit 1167 2121 1692 2236Contempt 1798 2226 1750 2706Starelook hard at 1991 2362 1686 2363Shame 1023 1972 1683 2738Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 645 1663 1169 2337Guilt 262 937 119 378Justify oneselfapologise 992 2511 744 1924

SadnessHappiness 317 1280 412 1594Laughget excited 123 789 128 114Serenity 887t 2017 318 1456Smilerelaxcontemplate 621 1848 346 1196Sadness 7690 2816 8251 2258Cryisolate oneself 6008 3131 6736 3059Fear 849t 1820 1546 2637Tremblefreeze 1595 2763 1135 2068Anger 1825 2641 2261 2919Hitinsultcriticise 532 1399 641 1517Disgust 651t 2015 176 940Grimacevomit 790 2017 353 1318Contempt 659 2125 332 1121Starelook hard at 000 000 045 397Shame 214 1050 141 711Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 2008 2916 724 1680Guilt 1524 2494 2141 2985Justify oneselfapologise 315 1065 391 1478

FearHappiness 317 1487 006 054Laughget excited 203 1054 058 361Serenity 587 1698 082 327

(Continued overleaf)

627

TABLE 3(Continued)

Men Women

Situation Mean SD Mean SD

Smilerelaxcontemplate 1048 2243 182 666Sadness 2333 3051 2929 3588Cryisolate oneself 1306 2536 3022 3582Fear 5111 3207 7535 2715Tremblefreeze 2008 2565 3378 3378Anger 2468 3297 1954 2949Hitinsultcriticise 1222 2098 446 1410Disgust 787 1808 1006 2206Grimacevomit 429 1270 365 1115Contempt 1192 2216 1141 2078Starelook hard at 677 1822 391 1405Shame 143 470 200 615Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 1606 2579 1000 2117Guilt 794 2199 369 995Justify oneselfapologise 282 1263 276 1319

ShameHappiness 452 1596 144 1039Laughget excited 1825 2905 1387 1990Serenity 444 1492 182 1028Smilerelaxcontemplate 1206t 2333 623 1262Sadness 1151 2121 2077 2361Cryisolate oneself 334 877 426 1107Fear 1246 2431 1135 1700Tremblefreeze 776 1569 894 1491Anger 1262 2259 1432 2408Hitinsultcriticise 565 1478 314 1140Disgust 206 966 347 1244Grimacevomit 202 590 231 1086Contempt 730 1532 811 1880Starelook hard at 347 833 304 1160Shame 4819 3534 5968 2948Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 2563 2974 2885 2908Guilt 3095 3442 4788 3282Justify oneselfapologise 4379 3144 4256 3074

GuiltHappiness 1024 2432 355 1189Laughget excited 734 2259 584 1761Serenity 262 1008 223 771Smilerelaxcontemplate 645 1692 416 1409Sadness 2003t 2705 2971 3390Cryisolate oneself 960 1992 2273 2979Fear 1778 2667 2653 3305

(Continued)

628

differences we will not discuss these data in detail However two things arenoteworthy First both men and women report lower probabilities that theywould react with a certain behaviour for example lsquolsquoto laughto get excitedrsquorsquothan with the emotion that corresponds to the behaviour (happiness) Thisfinding is not unexpected as individuals do not always express their emotionsoutwardly or may have developed idiosyncratic means of expressing certainemotions Second the profile data for the behaviours resemble strongly theemotional reactions reported For example for anger the highest means arefound for to hitto insultto criticise for to cryto isolate one self and for to stare

TABLE 3(Continued)

Men Women

Situation Mean SD Mean SD

Tremblefreeze 1206 2212 1227 2024Anger 1762 2980 1926 2950Hitinsultcriticise 129 543 221 720Disgust 1248 2569 1152 2402Grimacevomit 581 1642 351 1385Contempt 1603 2857 1464 2611Starelook hard at 129 495 136 485Shame 2667 3227 5375 3467Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 1952 2472 1769 2333Guilt 5071 3885 5753 3372Justify oneselfapologise 4484 3581 4286 3608

HappinessHappiness 8913 1981 9106 1471Laughget excited 5763 3420 6069 3283Serenity 2738t 3650 3906 3797Smilerelaxcontemplate 5451 3445 4647 3432Sadness 127 946 020 123Cryisolate oneself 040 318 029 141Fear 103 372 206 680Tremblefreeze 419t 1313 090 057Anger 032 252 000 000Hitinsultcriticise 000 000 013 114Disgust 048 378 000 000Grimacevomit 000 000 000 000Contempt 081 522 000 000Starelook hard at 355 1392 147 388Shame 111 764 000 000Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 718 1905 687 1859Guilt 270 1526 000 000Justify oneselfapologise 355 1535 090 340

Note Significant differences between men and women tp lt 1 p lt 05 p lt 01 p lt 001

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 629

to look hard at which correspond to anger sadness and contempt reactionsrespectively

However a number of differences between these two types of profiles canalso be observed For example for the emotional reaction profiles for anger andsadness the second highest mean is found for guilt whereas for the behaviouralreaction profiles for these emotions the second highest mean is found for shamebehaviours (to withdrawto lower onersquos headto blush) This findings may be dueto the general confusion between shame and guilt that has been observed forWestern cultures (see eg Wallbott amp Scherer 1994)

Sex differences To assess whether male and female participants differedwith regard to their expected emotional reactions and behaviours in the differentemotion eliciting situations profile analyses were conducted on the ratings foreach emotion situation All analyses and post-hoc tests were conducted at analpha level of 05 The results are shown in Table 4

TABLE 4Results of profile analyses on self-reported likelihood

of emotional reactionsbehaviours for men andwomen (Study 2)

Vignettes F df p

AngerReactions 295 8116 005Behaviours 183 8113 079

DisgustReactions 169 8115 107Behaviours 173 8116 099

FearReactions 330 8116 002Behaviours 390 8116 001

SadnessReactions 207 8116 044Behaviours 170 8115 105

GuiltReactions 186 8117 071Behaviours 130 8115 251

ShameReactions 215 8116 037Behaviours 70 8116 689

HappinessReactions 106 8116 397Behaviours 109 8116 376

630 HESS ET AL

Emotional reactions For all emotion situations except disgust andhappiness the emotional reactions profiles were nonparallel or marginallynonparallel (see Table 4) For the nonparallel profiles post-hoc tests revealedthat a similar pattern of sex differences emerged across the different emotionthemes For happiness and serenity there were either no significant differencesbetween men and women or men reported experiencing these emotions with ahigher probability than did women Conversely for sadness fear shame andguilt there were either no significant sex differences or women reported feelingthese emotions with a higher probability than did men For anger disgust andcontempt reactions no significant differences emerged

Emotional behaviour profiles Only the fear profile was significantlynonparallel (different) for men and women The profiles for anger and disgustwere marginally nonparallel and the remaining profiles were all parallel andcoincident Thus fewer significant differences between menrsquos and womenrsquosexpected behaviours in the situations described by the vignettes were found thanwas the case for the expected emotional reactions in Studies 1 and 2 Yet it isimportant to note that the probabilities reported for the behavioural profiles werelower overall and it is thus possible that this lack of differences is due to a lackof sensitivity of the measure

As postulated based on previous research (eg Crawford Clippax OnyxGault amp Benton 1992) as well as on the emotional reactions profile womenreport a higher probability of either crying or isolating oneself in an angersituation than do men Conversely and in accordance with both the literature onanger expression (see earlier) and the results from the emotional reactionsprofile men report it more likely to hitto insultto criticise than women thoughthis difference is not significant In addition they report that they aresignificantly more likely to stareto look hard (contempt) than do women abehaviour that could also be interpreted as aggressive when shown in responseto an insult

As regards the disgust situations men report that they are more likely tolaughto get excited This sex difference matches the finding for the emotionalreactions profile but was not found in Study 1 Finally for the fear situation menreport that they are more likely to hitto insultto criticise as well as to smiletorelaxto contemplate (serenity) than do women The emotional reactions profilefor fear from this study shows that men report a higher probability of reactingwith serenity but not with anger than do women As these behaviourscorrespond to a macho or cool demeanour in a threatening situation they fit thegeneral stereotype of masculine behaviour Conversely women report to bemore likely to trembleto freeze as well as to cryto isolate one self in fearsituations

In sum although many fewer sex differences reached significance whencomparing self-reported expected behaviours for men and women the pattern of

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 631

results is largely congruent with previous findings Specifically women reporteda higher probability of showing behaviours congruent with sadness and fear thandid men whereas men reported higher probabilities for anger and serenebehaviours In addition men reported a higher probability of showing acontempt behaviour in an anger situation yet the relevant behaviour (to staretolook hard) could be interpreted as aggressive in that context

How congruent are the findings fromStudies 1 and 2

As mentioned earlier not all significant differences found in Study 1 for theexpected reactions for men and women in general were also found for self-reports of expected reactions by men and women for themselves Yet as theresults for the two studies are based on different degrees of freedomsignificance levels cannot be directly compared To assess whether stereotypicaland self-reported sex differences were of similar magnitude we computed theeffect sizes for both studies Table 5 shows Cohenrsquos d for the post-hoc

TABLE 5Cohenrsquos d for sex differences in Studies 1 and 2

Study 1 Study 2

SituationEmotionalreactions

Emotionalreactions

Emotionalbehaviours

AngerHappiness 7023Serenity 7025Sadness 203 073 041Fear 123 030Anger 7055 7030Disgust 068Contempt 7026Shame 117 7035Guilt 129

DisgustHappiness 7032 7037 7047Serenity 7045 7026 7021Sadness 095 027Fear 189 033 033AngerDisgust 160 024 024Contempt 050Shame 062 7028 026Guilt 062 020

(Continued)

632 HESS ET AL

TABLE 5(Continued)

Study 1 Study 2

SituationEmotionalreactions

Emotionalreactions

Emotionalbehaviours

SadnessHappiness 7053Serenity 7032Sadness 184 022 024Fear 171 031Anger 7065 042Disgust 7030 7025Contempt 021Shame 020 7046 054Guilt 176 022 7033

FearHappiness 7021 7030Serenity 7026 7041 7052Sadness 189 055Fear 221 082 046Anger 7084 7043Disgust 067ContemptShame 049 7026Guilt 172 7025

ShameHappiness 7045 7023Serenity 7027 7020 7031Sadness 175 041Fear 128Anger 7069Disgust 065Contempt 054Shame 154 035Guilt 153 050

GuiltHappiness 7107 7035Serenity 7051Sadness 198 032 051Fear 162 029AngerDisgust 128Contempt 075Shame 178 051Guilt 183 020

633

comparisons for each emotion in the profile for the six negative emotionsituations across the two studies For Study 1 the effect sizes for the urban andthe rural sample were combined To facilitate the reading of the table onlydifferences for which d was at least 020 (ie equivalent to a small effect) areshown In general effect sizes for Study 1 are larger than those for Study 2 Foremotional reactions the expected differences between men and women were ofmedium (gt 050) to large (gt 080) size whereas for self-perceptions the expecteddifferences between men and women were small to medium in size

The most stable sex difference across the two studies was found for sadnessboth as a core emotion in sadness vignettes and as a secondary emotion That isfor all negative emotions the general stereotype describes women as reactingwith more sadness and women also perceive themselves as reacting with moresadness andor report more sadness behaviours Further women are expected toreact with (and they self-report) more shame and guilt reactionsbehaviours inshame and guilt situations However for the other negative emotions (angerdisgust sadness and fear) men report higher levels of shame reactions or shamebehaviours (but not both) Finally fear reactions and behaviours are described asmore likely for women in general and women perceive themselves as reactingwith more fear in disgust sadness fear and guilt situations

Another very stable sex difference across studies regards happiness andserenity reactions for negative emotion vignettes Men consistently are bothexpected to react with and self-report more happiness reactions as well ashappiness behaviours for disgust fear and shame vignettes To a lesser degreethis pattern also emerges for sadness and guilt vignettes As mentioned in thediscussion of Study 1 this may reflect differences in the value structure betweenmen and women

In sum a comparison of effect sizes shows considerable consistency acrossthe two studies Specifically noteworthy is the very consistent finding for boththe stereotypical beliefs and the self-reports with regard to sadness reactionswhich are considered as more likely for women than for men for all negativeemotion situations studied

However a number of differences between the general stereotypes and theself-perceptions also emerged specifically with regard to shame reactionsWhereas women are generally believed to be more likely to react with shameto negative emotion events the self-reported likelihood for shame as aconcomitant emotion is higher for men for all situations except for guilt(given the general confusion regarding these states observed in Westerncultures this may be due to shame being a core rather than a concomitantemotion for guilt scenarios) Yet self-reported shame behaviours are morelikely for women than for men in sadness and disgust situations A possibleexplanation is that men are actively trying to not show shame reactionsmdashtoconform to the general stereotypemdashbut are aware that they nonetheless arelikely to feel shame in those situations

634 HESS ET AL

To conclude the general stereotype and self-perceptions of emotionalreactions and behaviours suggest that women react with more sadness to all typesof negative emotion events Further the stereotypes and the self-perceptions arein agreement on menrsquos greater likelihood to react with happiness and serenity to avariety of negative emotions In contrast differences between the generalstereotypes and self-perceptions emerge for shame reactions with men reportingin situations when shame is a secondary emotion a higher likelihood of shamereactions but not necessarily shame behaviours than do women

STUDY 3

The results from Study 2 suggest that the stereotypical beliefs regarding menrsquosand womenrsquos emotional reactions and behaviours in a variety of emotion-inducing situations converge with self-perceptions of menrsquos and womenrsquosemotional reactions and behaviours in those same situations This finding isconsistent with the notion that autobiographic statements that requireparticipants to summarise over a number of related experiences may be biasedby stereotypical expectations (see eg Feldman-Barrett et al 1998) This leadsto the question of whether a similar overlap can also be found for narratives ofsingle specific emotional events from the participantsrsquo past If stereotypesindeed influence the way emotional events are reconstructed in a narrative wewould expect to find that women report more sadness events and express moresadness overall as well as more intense target emotions for all but anger eventsConversely we would expect men to report more situations involving anger aswell as experiencing more happiness and serenity overall

However as Study 3 is based on personal narratives and not on standardisedvignettes such a finding could simply be due to the fact that the emotionantecedent events in a real-life setting differ for men and women To assess thispossibility we decided to measure the emotion antecedent events by means of anappraisal questionnaire that assesses the participantsrsquo perception of the emotionantecedent situation To the degree that perceptions of emotion antecedents aresimilar for men and women while reported emotional reactions differ we canconclude that observed sex differences are not due to differences in theperception of the event per se For example if womenrsquos tendency to report moresadness were due to a difference in the perception of the emotion antecedentsituation we would expect women to report more often that they did not feel thatthey could do anything to change the situation or that they had to adapt to thesituation (as sadness is generally associated with the notion of irrevocable loss)

Overview

For this study we translated and adapted a questionnaire reported by Scherer(1988) that consists of two parts The first part invites the participants todescribe an event during which they experienced an emotion The second part

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 635

asks specific questions regarding the appraisal process We added a section inwhich we asked participants to complete an emotion profile for the event Toavoid the possibility that men and women would relate narratives from widelydifferent types of situations we asked participants to describe an event related tofamily interactions This class of situations should be readily accessible to allparticipants and ensure that emotional events involving human interactionpartners were reported

Allowing participants to choose the type of emotional events they report hasseveral advantages Most importantly we can assess what type of emotionalevents men and women choose to report spontaneously It also permitsparticipants to choose a salient event for which they can recollect theinformation necessary to respond to the appraisal questions On the other handthis approach is unlikely to result in a well-balanced distribution of emotiontopics thus making it difficult or impossible to analyse the data separately fordifferent emotion themes Yet in the context of the present study we were onlyinterested in sex differences in reports and not in absolute levels of responsesStudies 1 and 2 suggest that sex differences are very stable across all negativeemotions We therefore decided to allow participants to choose the emotiontheme and analysed the data collapsed across all negative emotion themes

Method

Participants A total of 171 students 87 men and 84 women with a meanage of 1862 years participated in this study Most of the participants (147) wererecruited from an ethnically homogenous junior college in the larger Montrealurban area (Cegep Lionel-Groulx Ste-Therese Quebec Canada) and partici-pated in groups An additional 24 participants were recruited individually

Procedure The experimenter explained that the study concerned emotionalevents in peoplersquos lives Participants were informed of their right to discontinueparticipation at any time and for any reason The experimenter then distributedthe questionnaires and responded to questions regarding the procedure The tasktook between 10 and 30 minutes Most of this time difference can be attributedto the amount of detail provided in the event description that ranged from acouple of words (eg birth of my daughter) to well over a page

Dependent measures The questionnaire consisted of four parts The firstpart was an open-ended question asking the participants to describe any eventinvolving their family life that led them to experience an emotion Sadnessshame anger guilt joy fear and disgust were provided as examples ofemotions Participants were asked to give a detailed description of the situationincluding the events that led up to it their reactions and those of others presentIn addition they were asked to identify the people involved with respect to their

636 HESS ET AL

relationship with them (eg my partner my sister etc) as well as to identify themain emotion theme of the story This served to ensure that the participantsbased their answers to the following questions on a specific event and not on aclass of similar events

Emotion description The second part of the questionnaire consisted ofquestions regarding when the event happened for how long they felt theemotion and the intensity of the core emotion identified as the emotion theme ofthe story Participants were also asked to indicate whether they tried to hide orcontrol their feelings and to what degree This part also contained the emotionprofile used in Studies 1 and 2 Using this measure participants were asked toindicate to what percentage they had felt each of the nine emotions from theprofile

Appraisal questionnaire A series of questions regarding the appraisal processwere used to assess the emotion antecedent events These questions weretranslated from the questionnaire reported by Scherer (1988) Specificallyparticipants were asked to what degree they had expected the situation to occurhow pleasant or unpleasant they considered the event whether the event helpedor hindered them in achieving their aims to what degree they considered that thesituation or the event that caused the emotion was unjust or unfair whether theevent was caused by their own or by someone elsersquos behaviour to what degreethey considered that the behaviour that caused the event would be judged asimproper or immoral by their acquaintances how the event affected theirfeelings about themselves such as their self-esteem or self-confidence andfinally to what degree the event changed their relationships with the peopleinvolved (all on negative-positive 7-point bipolar scales)

In addition participants were given a list of 11 specific potential causes of theevent (caused it myself natural causes act of god etc) They also evaluatedtheir ability to act upon or to cope with the event and its consequences using ascale involving 5 options The last part of the questionnaire consisted ofquestions regarding the participantsrsquo sex their age and whether they werecurrently seeing someone in a love-based relationship and if so for how long

Results

Of the 171 reported emotion events 147 (74 reported by men and 73 reported bywomen) concerned negative emotional events Of these a total of 62 weresadness events 22 were anger events and 11 were guilt events The remainingevents were distributed over a large number of negative emotions

As expected the very low frequency of reports for specific emotion themesmade separate analyses of reports of these events unfeasible We thereforedecided to perform analyses on the data summed over all negative emotionthemes The 24 events with positive emotion themes were obviously excludedfrom these analyses

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 637

Do women report more sadness events and men more anger events Toaddress this question a chi-square test was performed on the frequency withwhich men and women labeled the reported event as a sad versus an anger eventIn line with the results of Studies 1 and 2 we found men to report more angerevents and women to report more sadness events Specifically 14 men and 8women reported anger events and 25 men and 37 women reported sad events w2

= 355 p = 06 d = 42Do women report more intense core emotions than men For the intensity of

the core emotion experienced during the event women reported significantlyhigher levels (M = 593 SD = 101) than men (M = 554 SD = 123) t(145) =222 p = 028 d = 37

Do women and men report different levels of negative emotions across theemotion profile Figure 2 presents the emotion profiles separately for men andwomen An inspection of the profiles shows that overall men report morehappinessserenity whereas women report higher levels of all other emotionsThe profiles are nonparallel F(8 137) = 5877 p lt 001 Post-hoc analysesrevealed a significant sex difference in self-reported sadness with womenreporting higher levels than men To compare the sex differences in the profiles

Figure 2 Emotion profile for menrsquos and womenrsquos self-reported emotional reactions to negativeemotion events (Study 3)

638 HESS ET AL

found in this study with those from Studies 1 and 2 effect sizes were calculatedUsing the same cut-off point as previously (small effect size d = 020) only twodifferences were found to be stable across the three studies Men report higherlevels of happiness for negative emotion events (d = 7022) and women reporthigher levels of sadness (d = 043) As the latter difference may be due to thehigher frequency of reported sadness events by women we also verified whetherwomen report higher levels of sadness when sadness events are excluded fromthe analysis An inspection of the means revealed a marginally significantdifference in the same direction M = 6472 SD = 3247 and M = 5108 SD =3684 for women and men respectively t(83) = 181 p = 074 d = 40

Are there differences in appraisal patterns between men and women Asmentioned earlier the reported differences in emotional reactions could be dueto differences in the perception of the emotion antecedent events Yet nodifferences in appraisal patterns were found suggesting that emotion antecedentevents were perceived similarly In addition despite the more frequent and moreintense reports of sadness women did not report different coping styles thanmen and did not seem to feel more helpless (38 men vs 34 women report thisreaction) In fact women more frequently report that they felt able to lsquolsquoinfluencethe situation positivelyrsquorsquo (19 women vs 9 men report this reaction though thedifference is not significant)

Discussion

Study 3 extended the study of emotion stereotypes and self-perceptions based onvignettes to narratives of emotional events that the participants had in factexperienced themselves The goal of the study was to investigate whether thefindings from Studies 1 and 2 generalise to such recollections of personal eventsThe results strongly suggest this to be the case Women again report higherlevels of sadness for negative emotion events They also report more sad eventsin general Men on the other hand report more anger events as well as morehappiness for negative emotion events as was found in both Studies 1 and 2 Yetno reported differences in appraisal or coping emerged This suggests that theobserved differences in emotional reactions are not due to a bias in the appraisalprocess nor to an inability to act upon the event

If emotion antecedents do not differ why are differences in emotionalreactions reported We suggest that such differences represent an influence ofthe general emotion stereotype on the narrative reconstruction of a personalevent This conclusion is based on the observation of a null effect and thus opento the critique that the present study lacked the power necessary to detect realdifferences in appraisal between men and women To assess this critique wecalculated the absolute mean effect size for the interval-scaled appraisalquestions to be d = 015 To achieve 80 power a sample of 1100 participantswould be needed These data underscore the very slim differences in appraisals

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 639

between men and women making it highly unlikely that the effects observed inthis study are mediated by a difference in appraisal and thus by a difference inthe perception of the underlying event

CONCLUSIONS

The present series of studies had the goal to assess general emotion stereotypesand their influence on self-perceptions of emotional reactions by men andwomen We wanted to both describe these stereotypes in more detail with regardnot only to the modal emotion for a specific event (such as sadness reactions to aloss) but also with regard to the secondary emotions present in these situationsFurther we wanted to assess to what degree such expectations for men andwomen in general are endorsed by individuals for themselves as well as whetherthey would be spontaneously reported when relating a personally experiencedevent

Two gender differences were found to be stable across all three experimentalparadigms Women are expected to be more likely to react with sadness in allnegative emotion situations they expect themselves to be more likely to reactwith sadness as well as to cry and to withdraw more and finally women reportmore sadness in personal events In contrast men are expected to react withmore happinessserenity during negative emotional situations they expectthemselves to react more frequently this way as well as to laugh and smile moreand to be more relaxed They also tend to report more happiness whendescribing negative personal events

Not all general emotion stereotypes were found in the self-perceptionsstudied in Studies 2 and 3 Specifically according to Study 1 women areexpected to be more likely to react with shame and guilt in all negative emotionsituations Yet women did not expect to do so for themselves in situations otherthan shame and guilt situations and in fact men reported to be more likely toreact with shame in a variety of situations Further men and women did notreport any differences with regard to experiences of shame and guilt during thepersonal events

Study 3 included an appraisal questionnaire to address the question whetherthe self-reported differences in emotionality between men and women are due todifferences in the appraisal of the emotion antecedent events or rather to theinfluence of the prevalent norms No differences in appraisals were detectedsuggesting that the self-reported differences may be due to the normative forcesof the general stereotype rather than to appraisal differences

It may be argued that the Study 3 is based on recollections of past events andthat self-reports of emotional experiences represent after the fact reconstructionsthat differ from the actually experienced emotions during the event (seeParkinson amp Manstead 1993) A related argument may be made for Study 2where participants had to estimate the likelihood of their emotional reactions to

640 HESS ET AL

hypothetical events (even though the latter were chosen to be common everydayevents) This may well be true Yet the question remains why did men andwomen reconstruct the events differently in terms of their emotional reactionsThe answer would then be that the prevalent emotion stereotype which islargely endorsed by the population studied influenced this reconstruction Yetas peoplesrsquo sense of self depends on their past histories this would imply thatreconstructions of emotional events in line with emotion stereotypes mayeventually lead individuals to conform more closely to these stereotypes as theybecome more and more part of their emotional history and eventually of theiremotional self

Manuscript received 30 May 1997Revised manuscript received 23 February 2000

REFERENCES

Adams S Kuebli J Boyle PA amp Fivush R (1995) Gender differences in parent-childconversations about past emotions A longitudinal investigation Sex Roles 33 309ndash323

Allen JG amp Haccoun DM (1976) Sex differences in emotionality A multidimensional approachHuman Relations 29 711ndash722

Averill JR (1997) The emotions An integrative approach In R Hogan JA Johnson amp SRBriggs (Eds) Handbook of personality psychology (pp 513ndash541) San Diego CA AcademicPress

Birnbaum DW (1983) Preschoolersrsquo stereotypes about sex differences in emotionality Areaffirmation Journal of Genetic Psychology 143 139ndash140

Briton NJ amp Hall JA (1995) Gender-based expectancies and observer judgements of smilingJournal of Nonverbal Behavior 19 49ndash65

Brody LR amp Hall JA (1993) Gender and emotion In M Lewis amp JM Haviland (Eds)Handbook of emotions (pp 447-460) New York Guilford Press

Crawford J Clippax S Onyx J Gault U amp Benton P (1992) Emotion and genderConstructing meaning from memory London Sage

Dunn J Bretherton I amp Munn P (1987) Conversations about feeling states between mothers andtheir children Developmental Psychology 23 132ndash139

Eagly AH amp Mladinic A (1989) Gender stereotypes and attitudes toward women and menPersonality and Social Psychology Bulletin 15 543ndash558

Ekman P amp Friesen W (1986) A new pan-cultural facial expression of emotion Motivation andEmotion 10 159ndash168

Feldman-Barrett L Robin L Pietromonaco PR amp Eysell KM (1998) Are women the moreemotional sex Evidence from emotional experiences in social context Cognition and Emotion12 555ndash578

Fernandez-Dols J-M amp Ruiz-Belda M-A (1995) Are smiles a sign of happiness Gold medalwinners at the Olympic Games Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 69 1113ndash1119

Fischer A (1993) Sex differences in emotionality Fact or stereotype Feminism and Psychology 3303ndash318

Fivush R (1989) Exploring differences in the emotional content of mother child conversationsabout the past Sex Roles 20 675ndash691

Frank MG amp Ekman P (1993) Not all smiles are created equal The differences betweenenjoyment and nonenjoymen t smiles [Special Issue Current issues in psychological humorresearch] Humor International Journal of Humor Research 6 9ndash26

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 641

Gallois C (1994) Group membership social rules and power A social psychologica l perspectiveon emotional communication Journal of Pragmatics 22 301ndash324

Hall JA (1984) Nonverbal sex differences Communication accuracy and expressive styleBaltimore MD Johns Hopkins University Press

Izard C (1972) Patterns of emotions A new analysis of anxiety and depression New YorkAcademic Press

Jussim L Milbourn M amp Nelson W (1991) Emotional openness Sex-role stereotypes and self-perceptions Representative Research in Social Psychology 19 35ndash52

Kirouac G amp Hess U (1999) Group membership and the decoding of nonverbal behavior In PPhilippot R Feldman amp E Coats (Eds) The social context of nonverbal behavior (pp 182ndash210) New York Cambridge University Press

Kring AM amp Gordon AH (1998) Sex differences in emotion Expression experience andphysiology Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74 686ndash703

LaFrance M amp Banaji M (1992) Toward a reconsideration of the gender-emotion relationship InMS Clark (Ed) Emotion and social behavior Review of personality and social psychology(Vol 14 pp 178ndash201) Newbury Park CA Sage

LaFrance M amp Hecht MA (1995) Why smiles generate leniency Personality and SocialPsychology Bulletin 21 207ndash214

Lazarus RS (1991) Emotion and adaptation Oxford UK Oxford University PressParkinson B amp Manstead ASR (1993) Making sense of emotion in stories and social life

Cognition and Emotion 7 295ndash323Plutchik R (1980) Emotion A psychoevolutionar y synthesis New York Harper amp RowRime B Mesquita B Philippot P amp Boca S (1991) Beyond the emotional event Six studies on

the social sharing of emotion Cognition and Emotion 5 435ndash465Scherer KR (1988) Appendix C Questionnaire used in the International Survey on Emotion

Antecedents and Reactions (ISEAR) In KR Scherer (Ed) Facets of emotion Recent researchHillsdale NJ Erlbaum

Sherman JW amp Bessenhoff GR (1999) Stereotypes as source monitoring cues On theinteraction between episodic and semantic memory Psychological Science 10 106ndash110

Stoppard JM amp Gruchy CD (1993) Gender context and expression of positive emotionPersonality and Social Psychology Bulletin 19 143ndash150

Tucker JS amp Riggio RE (1988) The role of social skills in encoding posed and spontaneousfacial expressions Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 12 87ndash97

Wallbott HG amp Scherer KR (1994) Cultural determinants in experiencing shame and guilt InJune Price Tangney amp Kurt W Fischer (Eds) Self conscious emotions The psychology of shameand guilt embarrasment and pride (pp 465ndash487) New York Guilford Press

642 HESS ET AL

(c)

(d)

Figure 1 (Continued)

618

(e)

(f)

Figure 1 (Continued) (Continued overleaf)

619

In general the same differences between menrsquos and womenrsquos expectedemotional reactions were found for all negative emotion vignettes Regardless ofthe central emotion theme of the vignettes univariate post-hoc tests on theparticipantsrsquo ratings of expected anger happiness and serenity either revealedno differences in expected reactions between men and women or they revealedthat a higher percentage of men than women were expected to react with theseemotion displays Men were judged to be significantly more likely to expressanger in sadness anger shame and fear situations Further men were judged tobe significantly more likely than women to express happiness in guilt shameand sadness situations and to express serenity in guilt situations

On the other hand a different pattern emerged for participantsrsquo ratings ofexpected sadness fear disgust contempt shame and guilt For these emotionalreactions differences emerged for almost all negative emotion situations and inall cases women were expected to be more likely to react with these emotionsthan were men Specifically univariate post-hoc analyses revealed that womenwere judged to be significantly more likely to react with sadness fear and guiltin all emotion-relevant situations Further women were judged to besignificantly more likely to react with disgust and shame in all emotionsituations except for sadness situations Finally women were judged to besignificantly more likely than men to react with contempt in disgust guilt and

(g)

Figure 1 (Continued)

620 HESS ET AL

shame situations For happiness the profiles for both genders were parallel andcoincident suggesting that raters not only expected the same pattern of reactionsfrom men and women but also at the same level for each emotion

Discussion

In summary the analyses of the emotion profiles suggest the presence of clearexpectancies regarding not only the core emotion for a given type of situationbut also for the secondary emotional reactions that are expected in the situationAlthough the profiles for men and women are relatively similar with regard totheir major features a number of systematic differences in expectationsregarding menrsquos and womenrsquos emotional reactions emerged for the negativeemotion events but not for the positive

This latter finding is in contrast to the literature on the self-reportedfrequency of happiness expressionsexperiences in men and women (eg Allenamp Haccoun 1976) and with the finding that women are both believed and

TABLE 2Results of profile analyses on expected emotionalreactions for men and women in general (Study 1)

Vignettes F df p

AngerUrban 532 8175 001Rural 333 8169 001

DisgustUrban 507 8175 001Rural 461 8169 001

FearUrban 689 8187 001Rural 294 8163 004

SadnessUrban 489 8187 001Rural 267 8163 009

GuiltUrban 414 8173 001Rural 288 8167 005

ShameUrban 277 8173 007Rural 156 8167 140 (ns)

HappinessUrban 174 8273 090 (ns)Rural 127 8255 257 (ns)

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 621

observed to smile more than men (Briton amp Hall 1995) However given themultiple functions of smiles (see eg Fernandez-Dols amp Ruiz-Belda 1995Frank amp Ekman 1993 LaFrance amp Hecht 1995) differences in smiling may notreflect differences in happiness One explanation for this lack of continuity withthe existing literature is that the results of the present study are based on specificvignettes and not on global recollections Thus possible differences in real-world exposure to happiness-eliciting situations are less likely to influence ourfindings than they are to influence more global assessments

For all negative emotion events the profiles were nonparallel3 that is theratings revealed different expectations for men and women The differences areconsistent with the notion that the gender stereotype for emotional expressivenessdoes not assume women to be more expressive for all emotions For examplewomen are not expected to express more disgust and shame in sadness situationsthan are men Also women are expected to react with more contempt than aremen only in disgust guilt and shame situations while for all other situations nodifferences emerge However women are thought to express more sadness fearshame and guilt for all emotion-eliciting situations except for happiness eventsThat is regardless of the emotion theme prevalent in the vignettes women arealways expected to react with more sadness fear shame and guilt

An interesting case regards happiness as a secondary emotion in situationswith a negative core emotion The data reveal that men are typically expected toexperience more happiness in these situations than are women The differencesare strongest for guilt and shame vignettes which involve notions of cheatingand public misbehaviour and might reflect a difference in value structureinherent in the gender stereotype

In sum the results of Study 1 expand our knowledge regarding genderdifferences in emotion stereotypes by considering secondary emotionalresponses as well as modal emotional responses Specifically women are notonly expected to react with more sadness fear shame and guilt in situations forwhich these emotions are central but are expected to do so in all situationsinvolving negative affect Men on the other hand are expected to react withmore anger in a wide variety of situations involving negative affect as well aswith more happiness in some situations involving negative affect This suggeststhat the prevalent emotion stereotype describes womenrsquos predominant emotionalreactions to be more withdrawing (fear and sadness) and self-directed (shameand guilt) whereas menrsquos emotional reactions are seen as more active andaggressive

But to what degree are these general stereotypesexpectations reflected inthe self-perceptions that people have of their own emotional reactions AsJussim et alrsquos (1991) findings show self-perceptions can diverge from thecultural stereotypes Yet Jussim et al also suggest that over time these

3An exception are the shame profiles for the rural sample

622 HESS ET AL

stereotypical beliefs may act as a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy and moveself-perceptions in the direction of being consistent with the stereotype Alsoit is possible that widely held cultural beliefs become prescriptive and thuslead individuals to describe their own behaviour as being in accordance withthe stereotype Gallois (1994) in a review of emotion communication ininterpersonal situations concludes that emotion communication in suchsituations is highly rule-governed A similar perspective underlies Averillrsquos(1997) argument regarding the notion of emotion roles that have entrancerequirements such that for example a successful display of anger presupposessufficient power to adequately address the anger eliciting issue AlsoStoppard and Gruchy (1993) found that individuals anticipate costs andrewards for showing certain emotions in certain contexts Specifically womenexpect more costs when not expressing positive emotions in an lsquolsquootherrsquorsquo-oriented context whereas men expect rewards for showing positive emotionsregardless of context

Taken together these findings from diverse domains suggest that self-perceptions of emotional reactions should show a clear overlap withstereotypical expectations within any particular culture To the degree that weassume that these influences are due to recollection biases we may furtherspeculate that the overlap is less pronounced when asking about behaviouralreactions in particular social contexts than when asking for reactions inlsquolsquogeneralrsquorsquo or independent of a specific social situation Specifically as data onactual behaviour suggest relatively few sex differences in emotional behaviourwhereas the stereotype suggests a wide range of such differences differences inself-perceptions are more likely to be due to the influence of the culturalstereotypes than to actual behavioural differences between the genders Study 2is focused on an analysis of this possibility

STUDY 2

Study 1 confirmed that at least in the Quebec culture there are widely sharedbeliefs concerning how men and women differ in their emotion-relevantexpressive behaviour The central issue to be addressed in Study 2 therefore isthe degree of parallelism that exists between perceptions of how typical malesand females are perceived to respond to emotional events (Study 1) and self-perceptions of onersquos own emotional expressivity

To answer this question men and women drawn from the same population asin Study 1 were asked to indicate for each of the seven types of emotionsituations employed in Study 1 to what degree they expected to react themselveswith each of nine emotions if this event should happen to them In addition weasked participants to indicate the likelihood that they would show each of ninetypes of behaviours corresponding to the nine emotions of the emotion profileThese measures were embedded in a larger questionnaire that assessed beliefs

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 623

regarding emotional reactions of other social groups4 This placement made surethat the cultural beliefs and stereotypes held by the participants regardingemotional expressivity in general were evoked However the specific issue ofsex differences was not alluded to

Method

Participants A total of 360 students attending junior colleges in theMontreal urban region participated in the study Of these only thoseparticipants whose first language learned and still spoken was French whowere born in the province of Quebec (Canada) who had not lived outside ofQuebec for more than five consecutive years and who identified themselvesas either Canadian or Quebecois and not as a member of any other groupwere retained5 The resulting sample consisted of 289 individuals In total163 women and 126 men with a mean age of 1886 years participated ingroups of between 15 and 40 participants Of these 63 men and 85 womencompleted the emotion profiles and 63 men and 78 women completed thebehavioural reactions scale

Procedure Participants were informed of their right to discontinueparticipation at any time and for any reason The experimenter then distributedthe questionnaires The instructions as well as an example were provided on thefirst page The same instructions as employed in Study 1 were used the onlydifference being that participants were told to think about how they would reactand to indicate the likelihood in percent that they themselves would react witheach of the emotionsbehaviours indicated The same instructions were given forboth the emotion profile and the behavioural reactions scale with the onlydifference being that for the latter the word lsquolsquoemotionrsquorsquo was replaced withlsquolsquobehaviourrsquorsquo

Materials For each of seven emotions (happiness anger fear sadnessdisgust shame and guilt) two of the four vignettes employed in Study 1 wereretained Each participant responded to only one vignette for each emotion andvignettes were counterbalanced across participants

4 In the present context only data from the part of the questionnaire asking participants about howthey themselves would react in the described situation will be presented

5These selection criteria were included because the participants for Study 2 were recruited fromseveral Montreal junior colleges with an ethnically diverse population Emotion stereotypes are wellknown to differ between cultures (Kirouac amp Hess 1999) and the participants in Study 1 wererecruited from an ethnically homogenous population To ensure comparability between the twosamples it was therefore necessary to exclude participants from groups not present in the firstsample

624 HESS ET AL

Dependent measures

Emotion profiles These were computed in the same manner as in Study 1That is responses were averaged across the vignettes representing each specificemotion theme

Behavioural reactions scale This scale is intended to assess thebehavioural reactions that are expected for someone who is experiencing theemotional state in question To construct the scale a two-step procedure wasemployed

First 68 students of the University of Quebec at Montreal 54 women and 14men with a mean age of 279 years were asked to list for each of nineemotions (happiness serenity anger disgust fear contempt sadness shameand guilt) the behaviours and observable reactions they associate with eachspecific emotion The answers were compiled into frequency lists andsynonyms were grouped together The three most frequently namedbehaviours for each emotion were retained Due to overlap between someemotions this procedure yielded a list of 22 behaviours For the second step atotal of 44 participants 28 women and 16 men with a mean age of 226years were asked to rate for each behaviour and each of the nine emotionsthe likelihood of observing the behaviour in a person experiencing theemotion using a 7-point scale (1 very unlikely 7 very likely) Behavioursthat received a mean rating of 6 or above for only one emotion comprise thefinal scale

These consisted of the following items6 to laughto get excited (happiness)to trembleto freeze (fear) to hitto insultto criticise (anger) to cryto isolateoneself (sadness) to grimaceto vomit (disgust) to stareto look hard at(contempt) to smileto relaxto contemplate (serenity) to withdrawto loweronersquos headto blush (shame) to justify oneselfto apologise (guilt) On theprofile measure participants were asked to indicate the likelihood as apercentage that they would show each of the behaviours in a situation like theone described in the vignettes

Data analyses Each participant responded to one scenario for each of theseven emotions themes and used only one type of scale As in Study 1 thedata were collapsed over scenarios Because we had responses from morewomen than men for both dependent measures the data for the femaleparticipants were weighted to create equal cell sizes Profile analyses acrossthe nine emotional reactionsbehaviours were conducted to assess sexdifferences

6These items were translated from the original French by the authors

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 625

Results and discussion

As noted earlier the goal of Study 2 was to assess to what degree the self-perceptions of the men and women who participated in this study overlap withthe general stereotypes found in Study 1 To accomplish this the emotionprofiles from Study 1 were compared with the self-reported emotional profilesand with the behavioural reaction profiles collected here

Self-described emotion profiles The means and standard deviations for thenine scales of the emotion profiles for male and female participants arepresented in Table 3 A comparison of these means with those of the profilesfrom Study 1 reveals substantial similarities between the emotional reactionsexpected for oneself and those expected for men and women in general

Behavioral reactions Table 3 shows the means and standard deviations forthe nine behavioural reaction profiles These profiles represent the participantsself-report of the likelihood that they would display these specific behaviours inthe situations described by the vignettes As the focus of this paper is on sex

TABLE 3Means and standard deviations for self-perceptions of emotional reactionsbehaviours

for men and women (Study 2)

Men Women

Situation Mean SD Mean SD

AngerHappiness 262 1224 006 054Laughget excited 790 1826 429 1168Serenity 262 827 135 532Smilerelaxcontemplate 865 2068 435 1185Sadness 2359 2390 4405 3151Cryisolate oneself 935 2083 1825 2250Fear 603 1589 486 1070Tremblefreeze 332 814 630 1155Anger 6268 2873 6076 2928Hitinsultcriticise 3540 3042 2654 2873Disgust 1175 2447 1094 1997Grimacevomit 194 553 286 854Contempt 1865 2505 2102 2543Starelook hard at 2065 2718 1156 2216Shame 286 827 802 1887Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 1044 2187 1038 1642Guilt 349 826 491 1582Justify oneselfapologise 2045 3072 1761 2663

(Continued)

626 HESS ET AL

TABLE 3(Continued)

Men Women

Situation Mean SD Mean SD

DisgustHappiness 611 1714 143 575Laughget excited 1989 2669 915 1825Serenity 611 1855 208 1159Smilerelaxcontemplate 1159t 2113 578 1482Sadness 516 1537 490 1531Cryisolate oneself 073 403 346 1352Fear 373t 1066 911 2018Tremblefreeze 476t 1154 1015 1977Anger 1359 2146 1437 2521Hitinsultcriticise 1214 2210 1186 2151Disgust 5086 3257 5881 3178Grimacevomit 1167 2121 1692 2236Contempt 1798 2226 1750 2706Starelook hard at 1991 2362 1686 2363Shame 1023 1972 1683 2738Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 645 1663 1169 2337Guilt 262 937 119 378Justify oneselfapologise 992 2511 744 1924

SadnessHappiness 317 1280 412 1594Laughget excited 123 789 128 114Serenity 887t 2017 318 1456Smilerelaxcontemplate 621 1848 346 1196Sadness 7690 2816 8251 2258Cryisolate oneself 6008 3131 6736 3059Fear 849t 1820 1546 2637Tremblefreeze 1595 2763 1135 2068Anger 1825 2641 2261 2919Hitinsultcriticise 532 1399 641 1517Disgust 651t 2015 176 940Grimacevomit 790 2017 353 1318Contempt 659 2125 332 1121Starelook hard at 000 000 045 397Shame 214 1050 141 711Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 2008 2916 724 1680Guilt 1524 2494 2141 2985Justify oneselfapologise 315 1065 391 1478

FearHappiness 317 1487 006 054Laughget excited 203 1054 058 361Serenity 587 1698 082 327

(Continued overleaf)

627

TABLE 3(Continued)

Men Women

Situation Mean SD Mean SD

Smilerelaxcontemplate 1048 2243 182 666Sadness 2333 3051 2929 3588Cryisolate oneself 1306 2536 3022 3582Fear 5111 3207 7535 2715Tremblefreeze 2008 2565 3378 3378Anger 2468 3297 1954 2949Hitinsultcriticise 1222 2098 446 1410Disgust 787 1808 1006 2206Grimacevomit 429 1270 365 1115Contempt 1192 2216 1141 2078Starelook hard at 677 1822 391 1405Shame 143 470 200 615Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 1606 2579 1000 2117Guilt 794 2199 369 995Justify oneselfapologise 282 1263 276 1319

ShameHappiness 452 1596 144 1039Laughget excited 1825 2905 1387 1990Serenity 444 1492 182 1028Smilerelaxcontemplate 1206t 2333 623 1262Sadness 1151 2121 2077 2361Cryisolate oneself 334 877 426 1107Fear 1246 2431 1135 1700Tremblefreeze 776 1569 894 1491Anger 1262 2259 1432 2408Hitinsultcriticise 565 1478 314 1140Disgust 206 966 347 1244Grimacevomit 202 590 231 1086Contempt 730 1532 811 1880Starelook hard at 347 833 304 1160Shame 4819 3534 5968 2948Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 2563 2974 2885 2908Guilt 3095 3442 4788 3282Justify oneselfapologise 4379 3144 4256 3074

GuiltHappiness 1024 2432 355 1189Laughget excited 734 2259 584 1761Serenity 262 1008 223 771Smilerelaxcontemplate 645 1692 416 1409Sadness 2003t 2705 2971 3390Cryisolate oneself 960 1992 2273 2979Fear 1778 2667 2653 3305

(Continued)

628

differences we will not discuss these data in detail However two things arenoteworthy First both men and women report lower probabilities that theywould react with a certain behaviour for example lsquolsquoto laughto get excitedrsquorsquothan with the emotion that corresponds to the behaviour (happiness) Thisfinding is not unexpected as individuals do not always express their emotionsoutwardly or may have developed idiosyncratic means of expressing certainemotions Second the profile data for the behaviours resemble strongly theemotional reactions reported For example for anger the highest means arefound for to hitto insultto criticise for to cryto isolate one self and for to stare

TABLE 3(Continued)

Men Women

Situation Mean SD Mean SD

Tremblefreeze 1206 2212 1227 2024Anger 1762 2980 1926 2950Hitinsultcriticise 129 543 221 720Disgust 1248 2569 1152 2402Grimacevomit 581 1642 351 1385Contempt 1603 2857 1464 2611Starelook hard at 129 495 136 485Shame 2667 3227 5375 3467Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 1952 2472 1769 2333Guilt 5071 3885 5753 3372Justify oneselfapologise 4484 3581 4286 3608

HappinessHappiness 8913 1981 9106 1471Laughget excited 5763 3420 6069 3283Serenity 2738t 3650 3906 3797Smilerelaxcontemplate 5451 3445 4647 3432Sadness 127 946 020 123Cryisolate oneself 040 318 029 141Fear 103 372 206 680Tremblefreeze 419t 1313 090 057Anger 032 252 000 000Hitinsultcriticise 000 000 013 114Disgust 048 378 000 000Grimacevomit 000 000 000 000Contempt 081 522 000 000Starelook hard at 355 1392 147 388Shame 111 764 000 000Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 718 1905 687 1859Guilt 270 1526 000 000Justify oneselfapologise 355 1535 090 340

Note Significant differences between men and women tp lt 1 p lt 05 p lt 01 p lt 001

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 629

to look hard at which correspond to anger sadness and contempt reactionsrespectively

However a number of differences between these two types of profiles canalso be observed For example for the emotional reaction profiles for anger andsadness the second highest mean is found for guilt whereas for the behaviouralreaction profiles for these emotions the second highest mean is found for shamebehaviours (to withdrawto lower onersquos headto blush) This findings may be dueto the general confusion between shame and guilt that has been observed forWestern cultures (see eg Wallbott amp Scherer 1994)

Sex differences To assess whether male and female participants differedwith regard to their expected emotional reactions and behaviours in the differentemotion eliciting situations profile analyses were conducted on the ratings foreach emotion situation All analyses and post-hoc tests were conducted at analpha level of 05 The results are shown in Table 4

TABLE 4Results of profile analyses on self-reported likelihood

of emotional reactionsbehaviours for men andwomen (Study 2)

Vignettes F df p

AngerReactions 295 8116 005Behaviours 183 8113 079

DisgustReactions 169 8115 107Behaviours 173 8116 099

FearReactions 330 8116 002Behaviours 390 8116 001

SadnessReactions 207 8116 044Behaviours 170 8115 105

GuiltReactions 186 8117 071Behaviours 130 8115 251

ShameReactions 215 8116 037Behaviours 70 8116 689

HappinessReactions 106 8116 397Behaviours 109 8116 376

630 HESS ET AL

Emotional reactions For all emotion situations except disgust andhappiness the emotional reactions profiles were nonparallel or marginallynonparallel (see Table 4) For the nonparallel profiles post-hoc tests revealedthat a similar pattern of sex differences emerged across the different emotionthemes For happiness and serenity there were either no significant differencesbetween men and women or men reported experiencing these emotions with ahigher probability than did women Conversely for sadness fear shame andguilt there were either no significant sex differences or women reported feelingthese emotions with a higher probability than did men For anger disgust andcontempt reactions no significant differences emerged

Emotional behaviour profiles Only the fear profile was significantlynonparallel (different) for men and women The profiles for anger and disgustwere marginally nonparallel and the remaining profiles were all parallel andcoincident Thus fewer significant differences between menrsquos and womenrsquosexpected behaviours in the situations described by the vignettes were found thanwas the case for the expected emotional reactions in Studies 1 and 2 Yet it isimportant to note that the probabilities reported for the behavioural profiles werelower overall and it is thus possible that this lack of differences is due to a lackof sensitivity of the measure

As postulated based on previous research (eg Crawford Clippax OnyxGault amp Benton 1992) as well as on the emotional reactions profile womenreport a higher probability of either crying or isolating oneself in an angersituation than do men Conversely and in accordance with both the literature onanger expression (see earlier) and the results from the emotional reactionsprofile men report it more likely to hitto insultto criticise than women thoughthis difference is not significant In addition they report that they aresignificantly more likely to stareto look hard (contempt) than do women abehaviour that could also be interpreted as aggressive when shown in responseto an insult

As regards the disgust situations men report that they are more likely tolaughto get excited This sex difference matches the finding for the emotionalreactions profile but was not found in Study 1 Finally for the fear situation menreport that they are more likely to hitto insultto criticise as well as to smiletorelaxto contemplate (serenity) than do women The emotional reactions profilefor fear from this study shows that men report a higher probability of reactingwith serenity but not with anger than do women As these behaviourscorrespond to a macho or cool demeanour in a threatening situation they fit thegeneral stereotype of masculine behaviour Conversely women report to bemore likely to trembleto freeze as well as to cryto isolate one self in fearsituations

In sum although many fewer sex differences reached significance whencomparing self-reported expected behaviours for men and women the pattern of

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 631

results is largely congruent with previous findings Specifically women reporteda higher probability of showing behaviours congruent with sadness and fear thandid men whereas men reported higher probabilities for anger and serenebehaviours In addition men reported a higher probability of showing acontempt behaviour in an anger situation yet the relevant behaviour (to staretolook hard) could be interpreted as aggressive in that context

How congruent are the findings fromStudies 1 and 2

As mentioned earlier not all significant differences found in Study 1 for theexpected reactions for men and women in general were also found for self-reports of expected reactions by men and women for themselves Yet as theresults for the two studies are based on different degrees of freedomsignificance levels cannot be directly compared To assess whether stereotypicaland self-reported sex differences were of similar magnitude we computed theeffect sizes for both studies Table 5 shows Cohenrsquos d for the post-hoc

TABLE 5Cohenrsquos d for sex differences in Studies 1 and 2

Study 1 Study 2

SituationEmotionalreactions

Emotionalreactions

Emotionalbehaviours

AngerHappiness 7023Serenity 7025Sadness 203 073 041Fear 123 030Anger 7055 7030Disgust 068Contempt 7026Shame 117 7035Guilt 129

DisgustHappiness 7032 7037 7047Serenity 7045 7026 7021Sadness 095 027Fear 189 033 033AngerDisgust 160 024 024Contempt 050Shame 062 7028 026Guilt 062 020

(Continued)

632 HESS ET AL

TABLE 5(Continued)

Study 1 Study 2

SituationEmotionalreactions

Emotionalreactions

Emotionalbehaviours

SadnessHappiness 7053Serenity 7032Sadness 184 022 024Fear 171 031Anger 7065 042Disgust 7030 7025Contempt 021Shame 020 7046 054Guilt 176 022 7033

FearHappiness 7021 7030Serenity 7026 7041 7052Sadness 189 055Fear 221 082 046Anger 7084 7043Disgust 067ContemptShame 049 7026Guilt 172 7025

ShameHappiness 7045 7023Serenity 7027 7020 7031Sadness 175 041Fear 128Anger 7069Disgust 065Contempt 054Shame 154 035Guilt 153 050

GuiltHappiness 7107 7035Serenity 7051Sadness 198 032 051Fear 162 029AngerDisgust 128Contempt 075Shame 178 051Guilt 183 020

633

comparisons for each emotion in the profile for the six negative emotionsituations across the two studies For Study 1 the effect sizes for the urban andthe rural sample were combined To facilitate the reading of the table onlydifferences for which d was at least 020 (ie equivalent to a small effect) areshown In general effect sizes for Study 1 are larger than those for Study 2 Foremotional reactions the expected differences between men and women were ofmedium (gt 050) to large (gt 080) size whereas for self-perceptions the expecteddifferences between men and women were small to medium in size

The most stable sex difference across the two studies was found for sadnessboth as a core emotion in sadness vignettes and as a secondary emotion That isfor all negative emotions the general stereotype describes women as reactingwith more sadness and women also perceive themselves as reacting with moresadness andor report more sadness behaviours Further women are expected toreact with (and they self-report) more shame and guilt reactionsbehaviours inshame and guilt situations However for the other negative emotions (angerdisgust sadness and fear) men report higher levels of shame reactions or shamebehaviours (but not both) Finally fear reactions and behaviours are described asmore likely for women in general and women perceive themselves as reactingwith more fear in disgust sadness fear and guilt situations

Another very stable sex difference across studies regards happiness andserenity reactions for negative emotion vignettes Men consistently are bothexpected to react with and self-report more happiness reactions as well ashappiness behaviours for disgust fear and shame vignettes To a lesser degreethis pattern also emerges for sadness and guilt vignettes As mentioned in thediscussion of Study 1 this may reflect differences in the value structure betweenmen and women

In sum a comparison of effect sizes shows considerable consistency acrossthe two studies Specifically noteworthy is the very consistent finding for boththe stereotypical beliefs and the self-reports with regard to sadness reactionswhich are considered as more likely for women than for men for all negativeemotion situations studied

However a number of differences between the general stereotypes and theself-perceptions also emerged specifically with regard to shame reactionsWhereas women are generally believed to be more likely to react with shameto negative emotion events the self-reported likelihood for shame as aconcomitant emotion is higher for men for all situations except for guilt(given the general confusion regarding these states observed in Westerncultures this may be due to shame being a core rather than a concomitantemotion for guilt scenarios) Yet self-reported shame behaviours are morelikely for women than for men in sadness and disgust situations A possibleexplanation is that men are actively trying to not show shame reactionsmdashtoconform to the general stereotypemdashbut are aware that they nonetheless arelikely to feel shame in those situations

634 HESS ET AL

To conclude the general stereotype and self-perceptions of emotionalreactions and behaviours suggest that women react with more sadness to all typesof negative emotion events Further the stereotypes and the self-perceptions arein agreement on menrsquos greater likelihood to react with happiness and serenity to avariety of negative emotions In contrast differences between the generalstereotypes and self-perceptions emerge for shame reactions with men reportingin situations when shame is a secondary emotion a higher likelihood of shamereactions but not necessarily shame behaviours than do women

STUDY 3

The results from Study 2 suggest that the stereotypical beliefs regarding menrsquosand womenrsquos emotional reactions and behaviours in a variety of emotion-inducing situations converge with self-perceptions of menrsquos and womenrsquosemotional reactions and behaviours in those same situations This finding isconsistent with the notion that autobiographic statements that requireparticipants to summarise over a number of related experiences may be biasedby stereotypical expectations (see eg Feldman-Barrett et al 1998) This leadsto the question of whether a similar overlap can also be found for narratives ofsingle specific emotional events from the participantsrsquo past If stereotypesindeed influence the way emotional events are reconstructed in a narrative wewould expect to find that women report more sadness events and express moresadness overall as well as more intense target emotions for all but anger eventsConversely we would expect men to report more situations involving anger aswell as experiencing more happiness and serenity overall

However as Study 3 is based on personal narratives and not on standardisedvignettes such a finding could simply be due to the fact that the emotionantecedent events in a real-life setting differ for men and women To assess thispossibility we decided to measure the emotion antecedent events by means of anappraisal questionnaire that assesses the participantsrsquo perception of the emotionantecedent situation To the degree that perceptions of emotion antecedents aresimilar for men and women while reported emotional reactions differ we canconclude that observed sex differences are not due to differences in theperception of the event per se For example if womenrsquos tendency to report moresadness were due to a difference in the perception of the emotion antecedentsituation we would expect women to report more often that they did not feel thatthey could do anything to change the situation or that they had to adapt to thesituation (as sadness is generally associated with the notion of irrevocable loss)

Overview

For this study we translated and adapted a questionnaire reported by Scherer(1988) that consists of two parts The first part invites the participants todescribe an event during which they experienced an emotion The second part

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 635

asks specific questions regarding the appraisal process We added a section inwhich we asked participants to complete an emotion profile for the event Toavoid the possibility that men and women would relate narratives from widelydifferent types of situations we asked participants to describe an event related tofamily interactions This class of situations should be readily accessible to allparticipants and ensure that emotional events involving human interactionpartners were reported

Allowing participants to choose the type of emotional events they report hasseveral advantages Most importantly we can assess what type of emotionalevents men and women choose to report spontaneously It also permitsparticipants to choose a salient event for which they can recollect theinformation necessary to respond to the appraisal questions On the other handthis approach is unlikely to result in a well-balanced distribution of emotiontopics thus making it difficult or impossible to analyse the data separately fordifferent emotion themes Yet in the context of the present study we were onlyinterested in sex differences in reports and not in absolute levels of responsesStudies 1 and 2 suggest that sex differences are very stable across all negativeemotions We therefore decided to allow participants to choose the emotiontheme and analysed the data collapsed across all negative emotion themes

Method

Participants A total of 171 students 87 men and 84 women with a meanage of 1862 years participated in this study Most of the participants (147) wererecruited from an ethnically homogenous junior college in the larger Montrealurban area (Cegep Lionel-Groulx Ste-Therese Quebec Canada) and partici-pated in groups An additional 24 participants were recruited individually

Procedure The experimenter explained that the study concerned emotionalevents in peoplersquos lives Participants were informed of their right to discontinueparticipation at any time and for any reason The experimenter then distributedthe questionnaires and responded to questions regarding the procedure The tasktook between 10 and 30 minutes Most of this time difference can be attributedto the amount of detail provided in the event description that ranged from acouple of words (eg birth of my daughter) to well over a page

Dependent measures The questionnaire consisted of four parts The firstpart was an open-ended question asking the participants to describe any eventinvolving their family life that led them to experience an emotion Sadnessshame anger guilt joy fear and disgust were provided as examples ofemotions Participants were asked to give a detailed description of the situationincluding the events that led up to it their reactions and those of others presentIn addition they were asked to identify the people involved with respect to their

636 HESS ET AL

relationship with them (eg my partner my sister etc) as well as to identify themain emotion theme of the story This served to ensure that the participantsbased their answers to the following questions on a specific event and not on aclass of similar events

Emotion description The second part of the questionnaire consisted ofquestions regarding when the event happened for how long they felt theemotion and the intensity of the core emotion identified as the emotion theme ofthe story Participants were also asked to indicate whether they tried to hide orcontrol their feelings and to what degree This part also contained the emotionprofile used in Studies 1 and 2 Using this measure participants were asked toindicate to what percentage they had felt each of the nine emotions from theprofile

Appraisal questionnaire A series of questions regarding the appraisal processwere used to assess the emotion antecedent events These questions weretranslated from the questionnaire reported by Scherer (1988) Specificallyparticipants were asked to what degree they had expected the situation to occurhow pleasant or unpleasant they considered the event whether the event helpedor hindered them in achieving their aims to what degree they considered that thesituation or the event that caused the emotion was unjust or unfair whether theevent was caused by their own or by someone elsersquos behaviour to what degreethey considered that the behaviour that caused the event would be judged asimproper or immoral by their acquaintances how the event affected theirfeelings about themselves such as their self-esteem or self-confidence andfinally to what degree the event changed their relationships with the peopleinvolved (all on negative-positive 7-point bipolar scales)

In addition participants were given a list of 11 specific potential causes of theevent (caused it myself natural causes act of god etc) They also evaluatedtheir ability to act upon or to cope with the event and its consequences using ascale involving 5 options The last part of the questionnaire consisted ofquestions regarding the participantsrsquo sex their age and whether they werecurrently seeing someone in a love-based relationship and if so for how long

Results

Of the 171 reported emotion events 147 (74 reported by men and 73 reported bywomen) concerned negative emotional events Of these a total of 62 weresadness events 22 were anger events and 11 were guilt events The remainingevents were distributed over a large number of negative emotions

As expected the very low frequency of reports for specific emotion themesmade separate analyses of reports of these events unfeasible We thereforedecided to perform analyses on the data summed over all negative emotionthemes The 24 events with positive emotion themes were obviously excludedfrom these analyses

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 637

Do women report more sadness events and men more anger events Toaddress this question a chi-square test was performed on the frequency withwhich men and women labeled the reported event as a sad versus an anger eventIn line with the results of Studies 1 and 2 we found men to report more angerevents and women to report more sadness events Specifically 14 men and 8women reported anger events and 25 men and 37 women reported sad events w2

= 355 p = 06 d = 42Do women report more intense core emotions than men For the intensity of

the core emotion experienced during the event women reported significantlyhigher levels (M = 593 SD = 101) than men (M = 554 SD = 123) t(145) =222 p = 028 d = 37

Do women and men report different levels of negative emotions across theemotion profile Figure 2 presents the emotion profiles separately for men andwomen An inspection of the profiles shows that overall men report morehappinessserenity whereas women report higher levels of all other emotionsThe profiles are nonparallel F(8 137) = 5877 p lt 001 Post-hoc analysesrevealed a significant sex difference in self-reported sadness with womenreporting higher levels than men To compare the sex differences in the profiles

Figure 2 Emotion profile for menrsquos and womenrsquos self-reported emotional reactions to negativeemotion events (Study 3)

638 HESS ET AL

found in this study with those from Studies 1 and 2 effect sizes were calculatedUsing the same cut-off point as previously (small effect size d = 020) only twodifferences were found to be stable across the three studies Men report higherlevels of happiness for negative emotion events (d = 7022) and women reporthigher levels of sadness (d = 043) As the latter difference may be due to thehigher frequency of reported sadness events by women we also verified whetherwomen report higher levels of sadness when sadness events are excluded fromthe analysis An inspection of the means revealed a marginally significantdifference in the same direction M = 6472 SD = 3247 and M = 5108 SD =3684 for women and men respectively t(83) = 181 p = 074 d = 40

Are there differences in appraisal patterns between men and women Asmentioned earlier the reported differences in emotional reactions could be dueto differences in the perception of the emotion antecedent events Yet nodifferences in appraisal patterns were found suggesting that emotion antecedentevents were perceived similarly In addition despite the more frequent and moreintense reports of sadness women did not report different coping styles thanmen and did not seem to feel more helpless (38 men vs 34 women report thisreaction) In fact women more frequently report that they felt able to lsquolsquoinfluencethe situation positivelyrsquorsquo (19 women vs 9 men report this reaction though thedifference is not significant)

Discussion

Study 3 extended the study of emotion stereotypes and self-perceptions based onvignettes to narratives of emotional events that the participants had in factexperienced themselves The goal of the study was to investigate whether thefindings from Studies 1 and 2 generalise to such recollections of personal eventsThe results strongly suggest this to be the case Women again report higherlevels of sadness for negative emotion events They also report more sad eventsin general Men on the other hand report more anger events as well as morehappiness for negative emotion events as was found in both Studies 1 and 2 Yetno reported differences in appraisal or coping emerged This suggests that theobserved differences in emotional reactions are not due to a bias in the appraisalprocess nor to an inability to act upon the event

If emotion antecedents do not differ why are differences in emotionalreactions reported We suggest that such differences represent an influence ofthe general emotion stereotype on the narrative reconstruction of a personalevent This conclusion is based on the observation of a null effect and thus opento the critique that the present study lacked the power necessary to detect realdifferences in appraisal between men and women To assess this critique wecalculated the absolute mean effect size for the interval-scaled appraisalquestions to be d = 015 To achieve 80 power a sample of 1100 participantswould be needed These data underscore the very slim differences in appraisals

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 639

between men and women making it highly unlikely that the effects observed inthis study are mediated by a difference in appraisal and thus by a difference inthe perception of the underlying event

CONCLUSIONS

The present series of studies had the goal to assess general emotion stereotypesand their influence on self-perceptions of emotional reactions by men andwomen We wanted to both describe these stereotypes in more detail with regardnot only to the modal emotion for a specific event (such as sadness reactions to aloss) but also with regard to the secondary emotions present in these situationsFurther we wanted to assess to what degree such expectations for men andwomen in general are endorsed by individuals for themselves as well as whetherthey would be spontaneously reported when relating a personally experiencedevent

Two gender differences were found to be stable across all three experimentalparadigms Women are expected to be more likely to react with sadness in allnegative emotion situations they expect themselves to be more likely to reactwith sadness as well as to cry and to withdraw more and finally women reportmore sadness in personal events In contrast men are expected to react withmore happinessserenity during negative emotional situations they expectthemselves to react more frequently this way as well as to laugh and smile moreand to be more relaxed They also tend to report more happiness whendescribing negative personal events

Not all general emotion stereotypes were found in the self-perceptionsstudied in Studies 2 and 3 Specifically according to Study 1 women areexpected to be more likely to react with shame and guilt in all negative emotionsituations Yet women did not expect to do so for themselves in situations otherthan shame and guilt situations and in fact men reported to be more likely toreact with shame in a variety of situations Further men and women did notreport any differences with regard to experiences of shame and guilt during thepersonal events

Study 3 included an appraisal questionnaire to address the question whetherthe self-reported differences in emotionality between men and women are due todifferences in the appraisal of the emotion antecedent events or rather to theinfluence of the prevalent norms No differences in appraisals were detectedsuggesting that the self-reported differences may be due to the normative forcesof the general stereotype rather than to appraisal differences

It may be argued that the Study 3 is based on recollections of past events andthat self-reports of emotional experiences represent after the fact reconstructionsthat differ from the actually experienced emotions during the event (seeParkinson amp Manstead 1993) A related argument may be made for Study 2where participants had to estimate the likelihood of their emotional reactions to

640 HESS ET AL

hypothetical events (even though the latter were chosen to be common everydayevents) This may well be true Yet the question remains why did men andwomen reconstruct the events differently in terms of their emotional reactionsThe answer would then be that the prevalent emotion stereotype which islargely endorsed by the population studied influenced this reconstruction Yetas peoplesrsquo sense of self depends on their past histories this would imply thatreconstructions of emotional events in line with emotion stereotypes mayeventually lead individuals to conform more closely to these stereotypes as theybecome more and more part of their emotional history and eventually of theiremotional self

Manuscript received 30 May 1997Revised manuscript received 23 February 2000

REFERENCES

Adams S Kuebli J Boyle PA amp Fivush R (1995) Gender differences in parent-childconversations about past emotions A longitudinal investigation Sex Roles 33 309ndash323

Allen JG amp Haccoun DM (1976) Sex differences in emotionality A multidimensional approachHuman Relations 29 711ndash722

Averill JR (1997) The emotions An integrative approach In R Hogan JA Johnson amp SRBriggs (Eds) Handbook of personality psychology (pp 513ndash541) San Diego CA AcademicPress

Birnbaum DW (1983) Preschoolersrsquo stereotypes about sex differences in emotionality Areaffirmation Journal of Genetic Psychology 143 139ndash140

Briton NJ amp Hall JA (1995) Gender-based expectancies and observer judgements of smilingJournal of Nonverbal Behavior 19 49ndash65

Brody LR amp Hall JA (1993) Gender and emotion In M Lewis amp JM Haviland (Eds)Handbook of emotions (pp 447-460) New York Guilford Press

Crawford J Clippax S Onyx J Gault U amp Benton P (1992) Emotion and genderConstructing meaning from memory London Sage

Dunn J Bretherton I amp Munn P (1987) Conversations about feeling states between mothers andtheir children Developmental Psychology 23 132ndash139

Eagly AH amp Mladinic A (1989) Gender stereotypes and attitudes toward women and menPersonality and Social Psychology Bulletin 15 543ndash558

Ekman P amp Friesen W (1986) A new pan-cultural facial expression of emotion Motivation andEmotion 10 159ndash168

Feldman-Barrett L Robin L Pietromonaco PR amp Eysell KM (1998) Are women the moreemotional sex Evidence from emotional experiences in social context Cognition and Emotion12 555ndash578

Fernandez-Dols J-M amp Ruiz-Belda M-A (1995) Are smiles a sign of happiness Gold medalwinners at the Olympic Games Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 69 1113ndash1119

Fischer A (1993) Sex differences in emotionality Fact or stereotype Feminism and Psychology 3303ndash318

Fivush R (1989) Exploring differences in the emotional content of mother child conversationsabout the past Sex Roles 20 675ndash691

Frank MG amp Ekman P (1993) Not all smiles are created equal The differences betweenenjoyment and nonenjoymen t smiles [Special Issue Current issues in psychological humorresearch] Humor International Journal of Humor Research 6 9ndash26

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 641

Gallois C (1994) Group membership social rules and power A social psychologica l perspectiveon emotional communication Journal of Pragmatics 22 301ndash324

Hall JA (1984) Nonverbal sex differences Communication accuracy and expressive styleBaltimore MD Johns Hopkins University Press

Izard C (1972) Patterns of emotions A new analysis of anxiety and depression New YorkAcademic Press

Jussim L Milbourn M amp Nelson W (1991) Emotional openness Sex-role stereotypes and self-perceptions Representative Research in Social Psychology 19 35ndash52

Kirouac G amp Hess U (1999) Group membership and the decoding of nonverbal behavior In PPhilippot R Feldman amp E Coats (Eds) The social context of nonverbal behavior (pp 182ndash210) New York Cambridge University Press

Kring AM amp Gordon AH (1998) Sex differences in emotion Expression experience andphysiology Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74 686ndash703

LaFrance M amp Banaji M (1992) Toward a reconsideration of the gender-emotion relationship InMS Clark (Ed) Emotion and social behavior Review of personality and social psychology(Vol 14 pp 178ndash201) Newbury Park CA Sage

LaFrance M amp Hecht MA (1995) Why smiles generate leniency Personality and SocialPsychology Bulletin 21 207ndash214

Lazarus RS (1991) Emotion and adaptation Oxford UK Oxford University PressParkinson B amp Manstead ASR (1993) Making sense of emotion in stories and social life

Cognition and Emotion 7 295ndash323Plutchik R (1980) Emotion A psychoevolutionar y synthesis New York Harper amp RowRime B Mesquita B Philippot P amp Boca S (1991) Beyond the emotional event Six studies on

the social sharing of emotion Cognition and Emotion 5 435ndash465Scherer KR (1988) Appendix C Questionnaire used in the International Survey on Emotion

Antecedents and Reactions (ISEAR) In KR Scherer (Ed) Facets of emotion Recent researchHillsdale NJ Erlbaum

Sherman JW amp Bessenhoff GR (1999) Stereotypes as source monitoring cues On theinteraction between episodic and semantic memory Psychological Science 10 106ndash110

Stoppard JM amp Gruchy CD (1993) Gender context and expression of positive emotionPersonality and Social Psychology Bulletin 19 143ndash150

Tucker JS amp Riggio RE (1988) The role of social skills in encoding posed and spontaneousfacial expressions Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 12 87ndash97

Wallbott HG amp Scherer KR (1994) Cultural determinants in experiencing shame and guilt InJune Price Tangney amp Kurt W Fischer (Eds) Self conscious emotions The psychology of shameand guilt embarrasment and pride (pp 465ndash487) New York Guilford Press

642 HESS ET AL

(e)

(f)

Figure 1 (Continued) (Continued overleaf)

619

In general the same differences between menrsquos and womenrsquos expectedemotional reactions were found for all negative emotion vignettes Regardless ofthe central emotion theme of the vignettes univariate post-hoc tests on theparticipantsrsquo ratings of expected anger happiness and serenity either revealedno differences in expected reactions between men and women or they revealedthat a higher percentage of men than women were expected to react with theseemotion displays Men were judged to be significantly more likely to expressanger in sadness anger shame and fear situations Further men were judged tobe significantly more likely than women to express happiness in guilt shameand sadness situations and to express serenity in guilt situations

On the other hand a different pattern emerged for participantsrsquo ratings ofexpected sadness fear disgust contempt shame and guilt For these emotionalreactions differences emerged for almost all negative emotion situations and inall cases women were expected to be more likely to react with these emotionsthan were men Specifically univariate post-hoc analyses revealed that womenwere judged to be significantly more likely to react with sadness fear and guiltin all emotion-relevant situations Further women were judged to besignificantly more likely to react with disgust and shame in all emotionsituations except for sadness situations Finally women were judged to besignificantly more likely than men to react with contempt in disgust guilt and

(g)

Figure 1 (Continued)

620 HESS ET AL

shame situations For happiness the profiles for both genders were parallel andcoincident suggesting that raters not only expected the same pattern of reactionsfrom men and women but also at the same level for each emotion

Discussion

In summary the analyses of the emotion profiles suggest the presence of clearexpectancies regarding not only the core emotion for a given type of situationbut also for the secondary emotional reactions that are expected in the situationAlthough the profiles for men and women are relatively similar with regard totheir major features a number of systematic differences in expectationsregarding menrsquos and womenrsquos emotional reactions emerged for the negativeemotion events but not for the positive

This latter finding is in contrast to the literature on the self-reportedfrequency of happiness expressionsexperiences in men and women (eg Allenamp Haccoun 1976) and with the finding that women are both believed and

TABLE 2Results of profile analyses on expected emotionalreactions for men and women in general (Study 1)

Vignettes F df p

AngerUrban 532 8175 001Rural 333 8169 001

DisgustUrban 507 8175 001Rural 461 8169 001

FearUrban 689 8187 001Rural 294 8163 004

SadnessUrban 489 8187 001Rural 267 8163 009

GuiltUrban 414 8173 001Rural 288 8167 005

ShameUrban 277 8173 007Rural 156 8167 140 (ns)

HappinessUrban 174 8273 090 (ns)Rural 127 8255 257 (ns)

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 621

observed to smile more than men (Briton amp Hall 1995) However given themultiple functions of smiles (see eg Fernandez-Dols amp Ruiz-Belda 1995Frank amp Ekman 1993 LaFrance amp Hecht 1995) differences in smiling may notreflect differences in happiness One explanation for this lack of continuity withthe existing literature is that the results of the present study are based on specificvignettes and not on global recollections Thus possible differences in real-world exposure to happiness-eliciting situations are less likely to influence ourfindings than they are to influence more global assessments

For all negative emotion events the profiles were nonparallel3 that is theratings revealed different expectations for men and women The differences areconsistent with the notion that the gender stereotype for emotional expressivenessdoes not assume women to be more expressive for all emotions For examplewomen are not expected to express more disgust and shame in sadness situationsthan are men Also women are expected to react with more contempt than aremen only in disgust guilt and shame situations while for all other situations nodifferences emerge However women are thought to express more sadness fearshame and guilt for all emotion-eliciting situations except for happiness eventsThat is regardless of the emotion theme prevalent in the vignettes women arealways expected to react with more sadness fear shame and guilt

An interesting case regards happiness as a secondary emotion in situationswith a negative core emotion The data reveal that men are typically expected toexperience more happiness in these situations than are women The differencesare strongest for guilt and shame vignettes which involve notions of cheatingand public misbehaviour and might reflect a difference in value structureinherent in the gender stereotype

In sum the results of Study 1 expand our knowledge regarding genderdifferences in emotion stereotypes by considering secondary emotionalresponses as well as modal emotional responses Specifically women are notonly expected to react with more sadness fear shame and guilt in situations forwhich these emotions are central but are expected to do so in all situationsinvolving negative affect Men on the other hand are expected to react withmore anger in a wide variety of situations involving negative affect as well aswith more happiness in some situations involving negative affect This suggeststhat the prevalent emotion stereotype describes womenrsquos predominant emotionalreactions to be more withdrawing (fear and sadness) and self-directed (shameand guilt) whereas menrsquos emotional reactions are seen as more active andaggressive

But to what degree are these general stereotypesexpectations reflected inthe self-perceptions that people have of their own emotional reactions AsJussim et alrsquos (1991) findings show self-perceptions can diverge from thecultural stereotypes Yet Jussim et al also suggest that over time these

3An exception are the shame profiles for the rural sample

622 HESS ET AL

stereotypical beliefs may act as a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy and moveself-perceptions in the direction of being consistent with the stereotype Alsoit is possible that widely held cultural beliefs become prescriptive and thuslead individuals to describe their own behaviour as being in accordance withthe stereotype Gallois (1994) in a review of emotion communication ininterpersonal situations concludes that emotion communication in suchsituations is highly rule-governed A similar perspective underlies Averillrsquos(1997) argument regarding the notion of emotion roles that have entrancerequirements such that for example a successful display of anger presupposessufficient power to adequately address the anger eliciting issue AlsoStoppard and Gruchy (1993) found that individuals anticipate costs andrewards for showing certain emotions in certain contexts Specifically womenexpect more costs when not expressing positive emotions in an lsquolsquootherrsquorsquo-oriented context whereas men expect rewards for showing positive emotionsregardless of context

Taken together these findings from diverse domains suggest that self-perceptions of emotional reactions should show a clear overlap withstereotypical expectations within any particular culture To the degree that weassume that these influences are due to recollection biases we may furtherspeculate that the overlap is less pronounced when asking about behaviouralreactions in particular social contexts than when asking for reactions inlsquolsquogeneralrsquorsquo or independent of a specific social situation Specifically as data onactual behaviour suggest relatively few sex differences in emotional behaviourwhereas the stereotype suggests a wide range of such differences differences inself-perceptions are more likely to be due to the influence of the culturalstereotypes than to actual behavioural differences between the genders Study 2is focused on an analysis of this possibility

STUDY 2

Study 1 confirmed that at least in the Quebec culture there are widely sharedbeliefs concerning how men and women differ in their emotion-relevantexpressive behaviour The central issue to be addressed in Study 2 therefore isthe degree of parallelism that exists between perceptions of how typical malesand females are perceived to respond to emotional events (Study 1) and self-perceptions of onersquos own emotional expressivity

To answer this question men and women drawn from the same population asin Study 1 were asked to indicate for each of the seven types of emotionsituations employed in Study 1 to what degree they expected to react themselveswith each of nine emotions if this event should happen to them In addition weasked participants to indicate the likelihood that they would show each of ninetypes of behaviours corresponding to the nine emotions of the emotion profileThese measures were embedded in a larger questionnaire that assessed beliefs

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 623

regarding emotional reactions of other social groups4 This placement made surethat the cultural beliefs and stereotypes held by the participants regardingemotional expressivity in general were evoked However the specific issue ofsex differences was not alluded to

Method

Participants A total of 360 students attending junior colleges in theMontreal urban region participated in the study Of these only thoseparticipants whose first language learned and still spoken was French whowere born in the province of Quebec (Canada) who had not lived outside ofQuebec for more than five consecutive years and who identified themselvesas either Canadian or Quebecois and not as a member of any other groupwere retained5 The resulting sample consisted of 289 individuals In total163 women and 126 men with a mean age of 1886 years participated ingroups of between 15 and 40 participants Of these 63 men and 85 womencompleted the emotion profiles and 63 men and 78 women completed thebehavioural reactions scale

Procedure Participants were informed of their right to discontinueparticipation at any time and for any reason The experimenter then distributedthe questionnaires The instructions as well as an example were provided on thefirst page The same instructions as employed in Study 1 were used the onlydifference being that participants were told to think about how they would reactand to indicate the likelihood in percent that they themselves would react witheach of the emotionsbehaviours indicated The same instructions were given forboth the emotion profile and the behavioural reactions scale with the onlydifference being that for the latter the word lsquolsquoemotionrsquorsquo was replaced withlsquolsquobehaviourrsquorsquo

Materials For each of seven emotions (happiness anger fear sadnessdisgust shame and guilt) two of the four vignettes employed in Study 1 wereretained Each participant responded to only one vignette for each emotion andvignettes were counterbalanced across participants

4 In the present context only data from the part of the questionnaire asking participants about howthey themselves would react in the described situation will be presented

5These selection criteria were included because the participants for Study 2 were recruited fromseveral Montreal junior colleges with an ethnically diverse population Emotion stereotypes are wellknown to differ between cultures (Kirouac amp Hess 1999) and the participants in Study 1 wererecruited from an ethnically homogenous population To ensure comparability between the twosamples it was therefore necessary to exclude participants from groups not present in the firstsample

624 HESS ET AL

Dependent measures

Emotion profiles These were computed in the same manner as in Study 1That is responses were averaged across the vignettes representing each specificemotion theme

Behavioural reactions scale This scale is intended to assess thebehavioural reactions that are expected for someone who is experiencing theemotional state in question To construct the scale a two-step procedure wasemployed

First 68 students of the University of Quebec at Montreal 54 women and 14men with a mean age of 279 years were asked to list for each of nineemotions (happiness serenity anger disgust fear contempt sadness shameand guilt) the behaviours and observable reactions they associate with eachspecific emotion The answers were compiled into frequency lists andsynonyms were grouped together The three most frequently namedbehaviours for each emotion were retained Due to overlap between someemotions this procedure yielded a list of 22 behaviours For the second step atotal of 44 participants 28 women and 16 men with a mean age of 226years were asked to rate for each behaviour and each of the nine emotionsthe likelihood of observing the behaviour in a person experiencing theemotion using a 7-point scale (1 very unlikely 7 very likely) Behavioursthat received a mean rating of 6 or above for only one emotion comprise thefinal scale

These consisted of the following items6 to laughto get excited (happiness)to trembleto freeze (fear) to hitto insultto criticise (anger) to cryto isolateoneself (sadness) to grimaceto vomit (disgust) to stareto look hard at(contempt) to smileto relaxto contemplate (serenity) to withdrawto loweronersquos headto blush (shame) to justify oneselfto apologise (guilt) On theprofile measure participants were asked to indicate the likelihood as apercentage that they would show each of the behaviours in a situation like theone described in the vignettes

Data analyses Each participant responded to one scenario for each of theseven emotions themes and used only one type of scale As in Study 1 thedata were collapsed over scenarios Because we had responses from morewomen than men for both dependent measures the data for the femaleparticipants were weighted to create equal cell sizes Profile analyses acrossthe nine emotional reactionsbehaviours were conducted to assess sexdifferences

6These items were translated from the original French by the authors

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 625

Results and discussion

As noted earlier the goal of Study 2 was to assess to what degree the self-perceptions of the men and women who participated in this study overlap withthe general stereotypes found in Study 1 To accomplish this the emotionprofiles from Study 1 were compared with the self-reported emotional profilesand with the behavioural reaction profiles collected here

Self-described emotion profiles The means and standard deviations for thenine scales of the emotion profiles for male and female participants arepresented in Table 3 A comparison of these means with those of the profilesfrom Study 1 reveals substantial similarities between the emotional reactionsexpected for oneself and those expected for men and women in general

Behavioral reactions Table 3 shows the means and standard deviations forthe nine behavioural reaction profiles These profiles represent the participantsself-report of the likelihood that they would display these specific behaviours inthe situations described by the vignettes As the focus of this paper is on sex

TABLE 3Means and standard deviations for self-perceptions of emotional reactionsbehaviours

for men and women (Study 2)

Men Women

Situation Mean SD Mean SD

AngerHappiness 262 1224 006 054Laughget excited 790 1826 429 1168Serenity 262 827 135 532Smilerelaxcontemplate 865 2068 435 1185Sadness 2359 2390 4405 3151Cryisolate oneself 935 2083 1825 2250Fear 603 1589 486 1070Tremblefreeze 332 814 630 1155Anger 6268 2873 6076 2928Hitinsultcriticise 3540 3042 2654 2873Disgust 1175 2447 1094 1997Grimacevomit 194 553 286 854Contempt 1865 2505 2102 2543Starelook hard at 2065 2718 1156 2216Shame 286 827 802 1887Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 1044 2187 1038 1642Guilt 349 826 491 1582Justify oneselfapologise 2045 3072 1761 2663

(Continued)

626 HESS ET AL

TABLE 3(Continued)

Men Women

Situation Mean SD Mean SD

DisgustHappiness 611 1714 143 575Laughget excited 1989 2669 915 1825Serenity 611 1855 208 1159Smilerelaxcontemplate 1159t 2113 578 1482Sadness 516 1537 490 1531Cryisolate oneself 073 403 346 1352Fear 373t 1066 911 2018Tremblefreeze 476t 1154 1015 1977Anger 1359 2146 1437 2521Hitinsultcriticise 1214 2210 1186 2151Disgust 5086 3257 5881 3178Grimacevomit 1167 2121 1692 2236Contempt 1798 2226 1750 2706Starelook hard at 1991 2362 1686 2363Shame 1023 1972 1683 2738Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 645 1663 1169 2337Guilt 262 937 119 378Justify oneselfapologise 992 2511 744 1924

SadnessHappiness 317 1280 412 1594Laughget excited 123 789 128 114Serenity 887t 2017 318 1456Smilerelaxcontemplate 621 1848 346 1196Sadness 7690 2816 8251 2258Cryisolate oneself 6008 3131 6736 3059Fear 849t 1820 1546 2637Tremblefreeze 1595 2763 1135 2068Anger 1825 2641 2261 2919Hitinsultcriticise 532 1399 641 1517Disgust 651t 2015 176 940Grimacevomit 790 2017 353 1318Contempt 659 2125 332 1121Starelook hard at 000 000 045 397Shame 214 1050 141 711Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 2008 2916 724 1680Guilt 1524 2494 2141 2985Justify oneselfapologise 315 1065 391 1478

FearHappiness 317 1487 006 054Laughget excited 203 1054 058 361Serenity 587 1698 082 327

(Continued overleaf)

627

TABLE 3(Continued)

Men Women

Situation Mean SD Mean SD

Smilerelaxcontemplate 1048 2243 182 666Sadness 2333 3051 2929 3588Cryisolate oneself 1306 2536 3022 3582Fear 5111 3207 7535 2715Tremblefreeze 2008 2565 3378 3378Anger 2468 3297 1954 2949Hitinsultcriticise 1222 2098 446 1410Disgust 787 1808 1006 2206Grimacevomit 429 1270 365 1115Contempt 1192 2216 1141 2078Starelook hard at 677 1822 391 1405Shame 143 470 200 615Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 1606 2579 1000 2117Guilt 794 2199 369 995Justify oneselfapologise 282 1263 276 1319

ShameHappiness 452 1596 144 1039Laughget excited 1825 2905 1387 1990Serenity 444 1492 182 1028Smilerelaxcontemplate 1206t 2333 623 1262Sadness 1151 2121 2077 2361Cryisolate oneself 334 877 426 1107Fear 1246 2431 1135 1700Tremblefreeze 776 1569 894 1491Anger 1262 2259 1432 2408Hitinsultcriticise 565 1478 314 1140Disgust 206 966 347 1244Grimacevomit 202 590 231 1086Contempt 730 1532 811 1880Starelook hard at 347 833 304 1160Shame 4819 3534 5968 2948Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 2563 2974 2885 2908Guilt 3095 3442 4788 3282Justify oneselfapologise 4379 3144 4256 3074

GuiltHappiness 1024 2432 355 1189Laughget excited 734 2259 584 1761Serenity 262 1008 223 771Smilerelaxcontemplate 645 1692 416 1409Sadness 2003t 2705 2971 3390Cryisolate oneself 960 1992 2273 2979Fear 1778 2667 2653 3305

(Continued)

628

differences we will not discuss these data in detail However two things arenoteworthy First both men and women report lower probabilities that theywould react with a certain behaviour for example lsquolsquoto laughto get excitedrsquorsquothan with the emotion that corresponds to the behaviour (happiness) Thisfinding is not unexpected as individuals do not always express their emotionsoutwardly or may have developed idiosyncratic means of expressing certainemotions Second the profile data for the behaviours resemble strongly theemotional reactions reported For example for anger the highest means arefound for to hitto insultto criticise for to cryto isolate one self and for to stare

TABLE 3(Continued)

Men Women

Situation Mean SD Mean SD

Tremblefreeze 1206 2212 1227 2024Anger 1762 2980 1926 2950Hitinsultcriticise 129 543 221 720Disgust 1248 2569 1152 2402Grimacevomit 581 1642 351 1385Contempt 1603 2857 1464 2611Starelook hard at 129 495 136 485Shame 2667 3227 5375 3467Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 1952 2472 1769 2333Guilt 5071 3885 5753 3372Justify oneselfapologise 4484 3581 4286 3608

HappinessHappiness 8913 1981 9106 1471Laughget excited 5763 3420 6069 3283Serenity 2738t 3650 3906 3797Smilerelaxcontemplate 5451 3445 4647 3432Sadness 127 946 020 123Cryisolate oneself 040 318 029 141Fear 103 372 206 680Tremblefreeze 419t 1313 090 057Anger 032 252 000 000Hitinsultcriticise 000 000 013 114Disgust 048 378 000 000Grimacevomit 000 000 000 000Contempt 081 522 000 000Starelook hard at 355 1392 147 388Shame 111 764 000 000Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 718 1905 687 1859Guilt 270 1526 000 000Justify oneselfapologise 355 1535 090 340

Note Significant differences between men and women tp lt 1 p lt 05 p lt 01 p lt 001

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 629

to look hard at which correspond to anger sadness and contempt reactionsrespectively

However a number of differences between these two types of profiles canalso be observed For example for the emotional reaction profiles for anger andsadness the second highest mean is found for guilt whereas for the behaviouralreaction profiles for these emotions the second highest mean is found for shamebehaviours (to withdrawto lower onersquos headto blush) This findings may be dueto the general confusion between shame and guilt that has been observed forWestern cultures (see eg Wallbott amp Scherer 1994)

Sex differences To assess whether male and female participants differedwith regard to their expected emotional reactions and behaviours in the differentemotion eliciting situations profile analyses were conducted on the ratings foreach emotion situation All analyses and post-hoc tests were conducted at analpha level of 05 The results are shown in Table 4

TABLE 4Results of profile analyses on self-reported likelihood

of emotional reactionsbehaviours for men andwomen (Study 2)

Vignettes F df p

AngerReactions 295 8116 005Behaviours 183 8113 079

DisgustReactions 169 8115 107Behaviours 173 8116 099

FearReactions 330 8116 002Behaviours 390 8116 001

SadnessReactions 207 8116 044Behaviours 170 8115 105

GuiltReactions 186 8117 071Behaviours 130 8115 251

ShameReactions 215 8116 037Behaviours 70 8116 689

HappinessReactions 106 8116 397Behaviours 109 8116 376

630 HESS ET AL

Emotional reactions For all emotion situations except disgust andhappiness the emotional reactions profiles were nonparallel or marginallynonparallel (see Table 4) For the nonparallel profiles post-hoc tests revealedthat a similar pattern of sex differences emerged across the different emotionthemes For happiness and serenity there were either no significant differencesbetween men and women or men reported experiencing these emotions with ahigher probability than did women Conversely for sadness fear shame andguilt there were either no significant sex differences or women reported feelingthese emotions with a higher probability than did men For anger disgust andcontempt reactions no significant differences emerged

Emotional behaviour profiles Only the fear profile was significantlynonparallel (different) for men and women The profiles for anger and disgustwere marginally nonparallel and the remaining profiles were all parallel andcoincident Thus fewer significant differences between menrsquos and womenrsquosexpected behaviours in the situations described by the vignettes were found thanwas the case for the expected emotional reactions in Studies 1 and 2 Yet it isimportant to note that the probabilities reported for the behavioural profiles werelower overall and it is thus possible that this lack of differences is due to a lackof sensitivity of the measure

As postulated based on previous research (eg Crawford Clippax OnyxGault amp Benton 1992) as well as on the emotional reactions profile womenreport a higher probability of either crying or isolating oneself in an angersituation than do men Conversely and in accordance with both the literature onanger expression (see earlier) and the results from the emotional reactionsprofile men report it more likely to hitto insultto criticise than women thoughthis difference is not significant In addition they report that they aresignificantly more likely to stareto look hard (contempt) than do women abehaviour that could also be interpreted as aggressive when shown in responseto an insult

As regards the disgust situations men report that they are more likely tolaughto get excited This sex difference matches the finding for the emotionalreactions profile but was not found in Study 1 Finally for the fear situation menreport that they are more likely to hitto insultto criticise as well as to smiletorelaxto contemplate (serenity) than do women The emotional reactions profilefor fear from this study shows that men report a higher probability of reactingwith serenity but not with anger than do women As these behaviourscorrespond to a macho or cool demeanour in a threatening situation they fit thegeneral stereotype of masculine behaviour Conversely women report to bemore likely to trembleto freeze as well as to cryto isolate one self in fearsituations

In sum although many fewer sex differences reached significance whencomparing self-reported expected behaviours for men and women the pattern of

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 631

results is largely congruent with previous findings Specifically women reporteda higher probability of showing behaviours congruent with sadness and fear thandid men whereas men reported higher probabilities for anger and serenebehaviours In addition men reported a higher probability of showing acontempt behaviour in an anger situation yet the relevant behaviour (to staretolook hard) could be interpreted as aggressive in that context

How congruent are the findings fromStudies 1 and 2

As mentioned earlier not all significant differences found in Study 1 for theexpected reactions for men and women in general were also found for self-reports of expected reactions by men and women for themselves Yet as theresults for the two studies are based on different degrees of freedomsignificance levels cannot be directly compared To assess whether stereotypicaland self-reported sex differences were of similar magnitude we computed theeffect sizes for both studies Table 5 shows Cohenrsquos d for the post-hoc

TABLE 5Cohenrsquos d for sex differences in Studies 1 and 2

Study 1 Study 2

SituationEmotionalreactions

Emotionalreactions

Emotionalbehaviours

AngerHappiness 7023Serenity 7025Sadness 203 073 041Fear 123 030Anger 7055 7030Disgust 068Contempt 7026Shame 117 7035Guilt 129

DisgustHappiness 7032 7037 7047Serenity 7045 7026 7021Sadness 095 027Fear 189 033 033AngerDisgust 160 024 024Contempt 050Shame 062 7028 026Guilt 062 020

(Continued)

632 HESS ET AL

TABLE 5(Continued)

Study 1 Study 2

SituationEmotionalreactions

Emotionalreactions

Emotionalbehaviours

SadnessHappiness 7053Serenity 7032Sadness 184 022 024Fear 171 031Anger 7065 042Disgust 7030 7025Contempt 021Shame 020 7046 054Guilt 176 022 7033

FearHappiness 7021 7030Serenity 7026 7041 7052Sadness 189 055Fear 221 082 046Anger 7084 7043Disgust 067ContemptShame 049 7026Guilt 172 7025

ShameHappiness 7045 7023Serenity 7027 7020 7031Sadness 175 041Fear 128Anger 7069Disgust 065Contempt 054Shame 154 035Guilt 153 050

GuiltHappiness 7107 7035Serenity 7051Sadness 198 032 051Fear 162 029AngerDisgust 128Contempt 075Shame 178 051Guilt 183 020

633

comparisons for each emotion in the profile for the six negative emotionsituations across the two studies For Study 1 the effect sizes for the urban andthe rural sample were combined To facilitate the reading of the table onlydifferences for which d was at least 020 (ie equivalent to a small effect) areshown In general effect sizes for Study 1 are larger than those for Study 2 Foremotional reactions the expected differences between men and women were ofmedium (gt 050) to large (gt 080) size whereas for self-perceptions the expecteddifferences between men and women were small to medium in size

The most stable sex difference across the two studies was found for sadnessboth as a core emotion in sadness vignettes and as a secondary emotion That isfor all negative emotions the general stereotype describes women as reactingwith more sadness and women also perceive themselves as reacting with moresadness andor report more sadness behaviours Further women are expected toreact with (and they self-report) more shame and guilt reactionsbehaviours inshame and guilt situations However for the other negative emotions (angerdisgust sadness and fear) men report higher levels of shame reactions or shamebehaviours (but not both) Finally fear reactions and behaviours are described asmore likely for women in general and women perceive themselves as reactingwith more fear in disgust sadness fear and guilt situations

Another very stable sex difference across studies regards happiness andserenity reactions for negative emotion vignettes Men consistently are bothexpected to react with and self-report more happiness reactions as well ashappiness behaviours for disgust fear and shame vignettes To a lesser degreethis pattern also emerges for sadness and guilt vignettes As mentioned in thediscussion of Study 1 this may reflect differences in the value structure betweenmen and women

In sum a comparison of effect sizes shows considerable consistency acrossthe two studies Specifically noteworthy is the very consistent finding for boththe stereotypical beliefs and the self-reports with regard to sadness reactionswhich are considered as more likely for women than for men for all negativeemotion situations studied

However a number of differences between the general stereotypes and theself-perceptions also emerged specifically with regard to shame reactionsWhereas women are generally believed to be more likely to react with shameto negative emotion events the self-reported likelihood for shame as aconcomitant emotion is higher for men for all situations except for guilt(given the general confusion regarding these states observed in Westerncultures this may be due to shame being a core rather than a concomitantemotion for guilt scenarios) Yet self-reported shame behaviours are morelikely for women than for men in sadness and disgust situations A possibleexplanation is that men are actively trying to not show shame reactionsmdashtoconform to the general stereotypemdashbut are aware that they nonetheless arelikely to feel shame in those situations

634 HESS ET AL

To conclude the general stereotype and self-perceptions of emotionalreactions and behaviours suggest that women react with more sadness to all typesof negative emotion events Further the stereotypes and the self-perceptions arein agreement on menrsquos greater likelihood to react with happiness and serenity to avariety of negative emotions In contrast differences between the generalstereotypes and self-perceptions emerge for shame reactions with men reportingin situations when shame is a secondary emotion a higher likelihood of shamereactions but not necessarily shame behaviours than do women

STUDY 3

The results from Study 2 suggest that the stereotypical beliefs regarding menrsquosand womenrsquos emotional reactions and behaviours in a variety of emotion-inducing situations converge with self-perceptions of menrsquos and womenrsquosemotional reactions and behaviours in those same situations This finding isconsistent with the notion that autobiographic statements that requireparticipants to summarise over a number of related experiences may be biasedby stereotypical expectations (see eg Feldman-Barrett et al 1998) This leadsto the question of whether a similar overlap can also be found for narratives ofsingle specific emotional events from the participantsrsquo past If stereotypesindeed influence the way emotional events are reconstructed in a narrative wewould expect to find that women report more sadness events and express moresadness overall as well as more intense target emotions for all but anger eventsConversely we would expect men to report more situations involving anger aswell as experiencing more happiness and serenity overall

However as Study 3 is based on personal narratives and not on standardisedvignettes such a finding could simply be due to the fact that the emotionantecedent events in a real-life setting differ for men and women To assess thispossibility we decided to measure the emotion antecedent events by means of anappraisal questionnaire that assesses the participantsrsquo perception of the emotionantecedent situation To the degree that perceptions of emotion antecedents aresimilar for men and women while reported emotional reactions differ we canconclude that observed sex differences are not due to differences in theperception of the event per se For example if womenrsquos tendency to report moresadness were due to a difference in the perception of the emotion antecedentsituation we would expect women to report more often that they did not feel thatthey could do anything to change the situation or that they had to adapt to thesituation (as sadness is generally associated with the notion of irrevocable loss)

Overview

For this study we translated and adapted a questionnaire reported by Scherer(1988) that consists of two parts The first part invites the participants todescribe an event during which they experienced an emotion The second part

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 635

asks specific questions regarding the appraisal process We added a section inwhich we asked participants to complete an emotion profile for the event Toavoid the possibility that men and women would relate narratives from widelydifferent types of situations we asked participants to describe an event related tofamily interactions This class of situations should be readily accessible to allparticipants and ensure that emotional events involving human interactionpartners were reported

Allowing participants to choose the type of emotional events they report hasseveral advantages Most importantly we can assess what type of emotionalevents men and women choose to report spontaneously It also permitsparticipants to choose a salient event for which they can recollect theinformation necessary to respond to the appraisal questions On the other handthis approach is unlikely to result in a well-balanced distribution of emotiontopics thus making it difficult or impossible to analyse the data separately fordifferent emotion themes Yet in the context of the present study we were onlyinterested in sex differences in reports and not in absolute levels of responsesStudies 1 and 2 suggest that sex differences are very stable across all negativeemotions We therefore decided to allow participants to choose the emotiontheme and analysed the data collapsed across all negative emotion themes

Method

Participants A total of 171 students 87 men and 84 women with a meanage of 1862 years participated in this study Most of the participants (147) wererecruited from an ethnically homogenous junior college in the larger Montrealurban area (Cegep Lionel-Groulx Ste-Therese Quebec Canada) and partici-pated in groups An additional 24 participants were recruited individually

Procedure The experimenter explained that the study concerned emotionalevents in peoplersquos lives Participants were informed of their right to discontinueparticipation at any time and for any reason The experimenter then distributedthe questionnaires and responded to questions regarding the procedure The tasktook between 10 and 30 minutes Most of this time difference can be attributedto the amount of detail provided in the event description that ranged from acouple of words (eg birth of my daughter) to well over a page

Dependent measures The questionnaire consisted of four parts The firstpart was an open-ended question asking the participants to describe any eventinvolving their family life that led them to experience an emotion Sadnessshame anger guilt joy fear and disgust were provided as examples ofemotions Participants were asked to give a detailed description of the situationincluding the events that led up to it their reactions and those of others presentIn addition they were asked to identify the people involved with respect to their

636 HESS ET AL

relationship with them (eg my partner my sister etc) as well as to identify themain emotion theme of the story This served to ensure that the participantsbased their answers to the following questions on a specific event and not on aclass of similar events

Emotion description The second part of the questionnaire consisted ofquestions regarding when the event happened for how long they felt theemotion and the intensity of the core emotion identified as the emotion theme ofthe story Participants were also asked to indicate whether they tried to hide orcontrol their feelings and to what degree This part also contained the emotionprofile used in Studies 1 and 2 Using this measure participants were asked toindicate to what percentage they had felt each of the nine emotions from theprofile

Appraisal questionnaire A series of questions regarding the appraisal processwere used to assess the emotion antecedent events These questions weretranslated from the questionnaire reported by Scherer (1988) Specificallyparticipants were asked to what degree they had expected the situation to occurhow pleasant or unpleasant they considered the event whether the event helpedor hindered them in achieving their aims to what degree they considered that thesituation or the event that caused the emotion was unjust or unfair whether theevent was caused by their own or by someone elsersquos behaviour to what degreethey considered that the behaviour that caused the event would be judged asimproper or immoral by their acquaintances how the event affected theirfeelings about themselves such as their self-esteem or self-confidence andfinally to what degree the event changed their relationships with the peopleinvolved (all on negative-positive 7-point bipolar scales)

In addition participants were given a list of 11 specific potential causes of theevent (caused it myself natural causes act of god etc) They also evaluatedtheir ability to act upon or to cope with the event and its consequences using ascale involving 5 options The last part of the questionnaire consisted ofquestions regarding the participantsrsquo sex their age and whether they werecurrently seeing someone in a love-based relationship and if so for how long

Results

Of the 171 reported emotion events 147 (74 reported by men and 73 reported bywomen) concerned negative emotional events Of these a total of 62 weresadness events 22 were anger events and 11 were guilt events The remainingevents were distributed over a large number of negative emotions

As expected the very low frequency of reports for specific emotion themesmade separate analyses of reports of these events unfeasible We thereforedecided to perform analyses on the data summed over all negative emotionthemes The 24 events with positive emotion themes were obviously excludedfrom these analyses

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 637

Do women report more sadness events and men more anger events Toaddress this question a chi-square test was performed on the frequency withwhich men and women labeled the reported event as a sad versus an anger eventIn line with the results of Studies 1 and 2 we found men to report more angerevents and women to report more sadness events Specifically 14 men and 8women reported anger events and 25 men and 37 women reported sad events w2

= 355 p = 06 d = 42Do women report more intense core emotions than men For the intensity of

the core emotion experienced during the event women reported significantlyhigher levels (M = 593 SD = 101) than men (M = 554 SD = 123) t(145) =222 p = 028 d = 37

Do women and men report different levels of negative emotions across theemotion profile Figure 2 presents the emotion profiles separately for men andwomen An inspection of the profiles shows that overall men report morehappinessserenity whereas women report higher levels of all other emotionsThe profiles are nonparallel F(8 137) = 5877 p lt 001 Post-hoc analysesrevealed a significant sex difference in self-reported sadness with womenreporting higher levels than men To compare the sex differences in the profiles

Figure 2 Emotion profile for menrsquos and womenrsquos self-reported emotional reactions to negativeemotion events (Study 3)

638 HESS ET AL

found in this study with those from Studies 1 and 2 effect sizes were calculatedUsing the same cut-off point as previously (small effect size d = 020) only twodifferences were found to be stable across the three studies Men report higherlevels of happiness for negative emotion events (d = 7022) and women reporthigher levels of sadness (d = 043) As the latter difference may be due to thehigher frequency of reported sadness events by women we also verified whetherwomen report higher levels of sadness when sadness events are excluded fromthe analysis An inspection of the means revealed a marginally significantdifference in the same direction M = 6472 SD = 3247 and M = 5108 SD =3684 for women and men respectively t(83) = 181 p = 074 d = 40

Are there differences in appraisal patterns between men and women Asmentioned earlier the reported differences in emotional reactions could be dueto differences in the perception of the emotion antecedent events Yet nodifferences in appraisal patterns were found suggesting that emotion antecedentevents were perceived similarly In addition despite the more frequent and moreintense reports of sadness women did not report different coping styles thanmen and did not seem to feel more helpless (38 men vs 34 women report thisreaction) In fact women more frequently report that they felt able to lsquolsquoinfluencethe situation positivelyrsquorsquo (19 women vs 9 men report this reaction though thedifference is not significant)

Discussion

Study 3 extended the study of emotion stereotypes and self-perceptions based onvignettes to narratives of emotional events that the participants had in factexperienced themselves The goal of the study was to investigate whether thefindings from Studies 1 and 2 generalise to such recollections of personal eventsThe results strongly suggest this to be the case Women again report higherlevels of sadness for negative emotion events They also report more sad eventsin general Men on the other hand report more anger events as well as morehappiness for negative emotion events as was found in both Studies 1 and 2 Yetno reported differences in appraisal or coping emerged This suggests that theobserved differences in emotional reactions are not due to a bias in the appraisalprocess nor to an inability to act upon the event

If emotion antecedents do not differ why are differences in emotionalreactions reported We suggest that such differences represent an influence ofthe general emotion stereotype on the narrative reconstruction of a personalevent This conclusion is based on the observation of a null effect and thus opento the critique that the present study lacked the power necessary to detect realdifferences in appraisal between men and women To assess this critique wecalculated the absolute mean effect size for the interval-scaled appraisalquestions to be d = 015 To achieve 80 power a sample of 1100 participantswould be needed These data underscore the very slim differences in appraisals

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 639

between men and women making it highly unlikely that the effects observed inthis study are mediated by a difference in appraisal and thus by a difference inthe perception of the underlying event

CONCLUSIONS

The present series of studies had the goal to assess general emotion stereotypesand their influence on self-perceptions of emotional reactions by men andwomen We wanted to both describe these stereotypes in more detail with regardnot only to the modal emotion for a specific event (such as sadness reactions to aloss) but also with regard to the secondary emotions present in these situationsFurther we wanted to assess to what degree such expectations for men andwomen in general are endorsed by individuals for themselves as well as whetherthey would be spontaneously reported when relating a personally experiencedevent

Two gender differences were found to be stable across all three experimentalparadigms Women are expected to be more likely to react with sadness in allnegative emotion situations they expect themselves to be more likely to reactwith sadness as well as to cry and to withdraw more and finally women reportmore sadness in personal events In contrast men are expected to react withmore happinessserenity during negative emotional situations they expectthemselves to react more frequently this way as well as to laugh and smile moreand to be more relaxed They also tend to report more happiness whendescribing negative personal events

Not all general emotion stereotypes were found in the self-perceptionsstudied in Studies 2 and 3 Specifically according to Study 1 women areexpected to be more likely to react with shame and guilt in all negative emotionsituations Yet women did not expect to do so for themselves in situations otherthan shame and guilt situations and in fact men reported to be more likely toreact with shame in a variety of situations Further men and women did notreport any differences with regard to experiences of shame and guilt during thepersonal events

Study 3 included an appraisal questionnaire to address the question whetherthe self-reported differences in emotionality between men and women are due todifferences in the appraisal of the emotion antecedent events or rather to theinfluence of the prevalent norms No differences in appraisals were detectedsuggesting that the self-reported differences may be due to the normative forcesof the general stereotype rather than to appraisal differences

It may be argued that the Study 3 is based on recollections of past events andthat self-reports of emotional experiences represent after the fact reconstructionsthat differ from the actually experienced emotions during the event (seeParkinson amp Manstead 1993) A related argument may be made for Study 2where participants had to estimate the likelihood of their emotional reactions to

640 HESS ET AL

hypothetical events (even though the latter were chosen to be common everydayevents) This may well be true Yet the question remains why did men andwomen reconstruct the events differently in terms of their emotional reactionsThe answer would then be that the prevalent emotion stereotype which islargely endorsed by the population studied influenced this reconstruction Yetas peoplesrsquo sense of self depends on their past histories this would imply thatreconstructions of emotional events in line with emotion stereotypes mayeventually lead individuals to conform more closely to these stereotypes as theybecome more and more part of their emotional history and eventually of theiremotional self

Manuscript received 30 May 1997Revised manuscript received 23 February 2000

REFERENCES

Adams S Kuebli J Boyle PA amp Fivush R (1995) Gender differences in parent-childconversations about past emotions A longitudinal investigation Sex Roles 33 309ndash323

Allen JG amp Haccoun DM (1976) Sex differences in emotionality A multidimensional approachHuman Relations 29 711ndash722

Averill JR (1997) The emotions An integrative approach In R Hogan JA Johnson amp SRBriggs (Eds) Handbook of personality psychology (pp 513ndash541) San Diego CA AcademicPress

Birnbaum DW (1983) Preschoolersrsquo stereotypes about sex differences in emotionality Areaffirmation Journal of Genetic Psychology 143 139ndash140

Briton NJ amp Hall JA (1995) Gender-based expectancies and observer judgements of smilingJournal of Nonverbal Behavior 19 49ndash65

Brody LR amp Hall JA (1993) Gender and emotion In M Lewis amp JM Haviland (Eds)Handbook of emotions (pp 447-460) New York Guilford Press

Crawford J Clippax S Onyx J Gault U amp Benton P (1992) Emotion and genderConstructing meaning from memory London Sage

Dunn J Bretherton I amp Munn P (1987) Conversations about feeling states between mothers andtheir children Developmental Psychology 23 132ndash139

Eagly AH amp Mladinic A (1989) Gender stereotypes and attitudes toward women and menPersonality and Social Psychology Bulletin 15 543ndash558

Ekman P amp Friesen W (1986) A new pan-cultural facial expression of emotion Motivation andEmotion 10 159ndash168

Feldman-Barrett L Robin L Pietromonaco PR amp Eysell KM (1998) Are women the moreemotional sex Evidence from emotional experiences in social context Cognition and Emotion12 555ndash578

Fernandez-Dols J-M amp Ruiz-Belda M-A (1995) Are smiles a sign of happiness Gold medalwinners at the Olympic Games Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 69 1113ndash1119

Fischer A (1993) Sex differences in emotionality Fact or stereotype Feminism and Psychology 3303ndash318

Fivush R (1989) Exploring differences in the emotional content of mother child conversationsabout the past Sex Roles 20 675ndash691

Frank MG amp Ekman P (1993) Not all smiles are created equal The differences betweenenjoyment and nonenjoymen t smiles [Special Issue Current issues in psychological humorresearch] Humor International Journal of Humor Research 6 9ndash26

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 641

Gallois C (1994) Group membership social rules and power A social psychologica l perspectiveon emotional communication Journal of Pragmatics 22 301ndash324

Hall JA (1984) Nonverbal sex differences Communication accuracy and expressive styleBaltimore MD Johns Hopkins University Press

Izard C (1972) Patterns of emotions A new analysis of anxiety and depression New YorkAcademic Press

Jussim L Milbourn M amp Nelson W (1991) Emotional openness Sex-role stereotypes and self-perceptions Representative Research in Social Psychology 19 35ndash52

Kirouac G amp Hess U (1999) Group membership and the decoding of nonverbal behavior In PPhilippot R Feldman amp E Coats (Eds) The social context of nonverbal behavior (pp 182ndash210) New York Cambridge University Press

Kring AM amp Gordon AH (1998) Sex differences in emotion Expression experience andphysiology Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74 686ndash703

LaFrance M amp Banaji M (1992) Toward a reconsideration of the gender-emotion relationship InMS Clark (Ed) Emotion and social behavior Review of personality and social psychology(Vol 14 pp 178ndash201) Newbury Park CA Sage

LaFrance M amp Hecht MA (1995) Why smiles generate leniency Personality and SocialPsychology Bulletin 21 207ndash214

Lazarus RS (1991) Emotion and adaptation Oxford UK Oxford University PressParkinson B amp Manstead ASR (1993) Making sense of emotion in stories and social life

Cognition and Emotion 7 295ndash323Plutchik R (1980) Emotion A psychoevolutionar y synthesis New York Harper amp RowRime B Mesquita B Philippot P amp Boca S (1991) Beyond the emotional event Six studies on

the social sharing of emotion Cognition and Emotion 5 435ndash465Scherer KR (1988) Appendix C Questionnaire used in the International Survey on Emotion

Antecedents and Reactions (ISEAR) In KR Scherer (Ed) Facets of emotion Recent researchHillsdale NJ Erlbaum

Sherman JW amp Bessenhoff GR (1999) Stereotypes as source monitoring cues On theinteraction between episodic and semantic memory Psychological Science 10 106ndash110

Stoppard JM amp Gruchy CD (1993) Gender context and expression of positive emotionPersonality and Social Psychology Bulletin 19 143ndash150

Tucker JS amp Riggio RE (1988) The role of social skills in encoding posed and spontaneousfacial expressions Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 12 87ndash97

Wallbott HG amp Scherer KR (1994) Cultural determinants in experiencing shame and guilt InJune Price Tangney amp Kurt W Fischer (Eds) Self conscious emotions The psychology of shameand guilt embarrasment and pride (pp 465ndash487) New York Guilford Press

642 HESS ET AL

In general the same differences between menrsquos and womenrsquos expectedemotional reactions were found for all negative emotion vignettes Regardless ofthe central emotion theme of the vignettes univariate post-hoc tests on theparticipantsrsquo ratings of expected anger happiness and serenity either revealedno differences in expected reactions between men and women or they revealedthat a higher percentage of men than women were expected to react with theseemotion displays Men were judged to be significantly more likely to expressanger in sadness anger shame and fear situations Further men were judged tobe significantly more likely than women to express happiness in guilt shameand sadness situations and to express serenity in guilt situations

On the other hand a different pattern emerged for participantsrsquo ratings ofexpected sadness fear disgust contempt shame and guilt For these emotionalreactions differences emerged for almost all negative emotion situations and inall cases women were expected to be more likely to react with these emotionsthan were men Specifically univariate post-hoc analyses revealed that womenwere judged to be significantly more likely to react with sadness fear and guiltin all emotion-relevant situations Further women were judged to besignificantly more likely to react with disgust and shame in all emotionsituations except for sadness situations Finally women were judged to besignificantly more likely than men to react with contempt in disgust guilt and

(g)

Figure 1 (Continued)

620 HESS ET AL

shame situations For happiness the profiles for both genders were parallel andcoincident suggesting that raters not only expected the same pattern of reactionsfrom men and women but also at the same level for each emotion

Discussion

In summary the analyses of the emotion profiles suggest the presence of clearexpectancies regarding not only the core emotion for a given type of situationbut also for the secondary emotional reactions that are expected in the situationAlthough the profiles for men and women are relatively similar with regard totheir major features a number of systematic differences in expectationsregarding menrsquos and womenrsquos emotional reactions emerged for the negativeemotion events but not for the positive

This latter finding is in contrast to the literature on the self-reportedfrequency of happiness expressionsexperiences in men and women (eg Allenamp Haccoun 1976) and with the finding that women are both believed and

TABLE 2Results of profile analyses on expected emotionalreactions for men and women in general (Study 1)

Vignettes F df p

AngerUrban 532 8175 001Rural 333 8169 001

DisgustUrban 507 8175 001Rural 461 8169 001

FearUrban 689 8187 001Rural 294 8163 004

SadnessUrban 489 8187 001Rural 267 8163 009

GuiltUrban 414 8173 001Rural 288 8167 005

ShameUrban 277 8173 007Rural 156 8167 140 (ns)

HappinessUrban 174 8273 090 (ns)Rural 127 8255 257 (ns)

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 621

observed to smile more than men (Briton amp Hall 1995) However given themultiple functions of smiles (see eg Fernandez-Dols amp Ruiz-Belda 1995Frank amp Ekman 1993 LaFrance amp Hecht 1995) differences in smiling may notreflect differences in happiness One explanation for this lack of continuity withthe existing literature is that the results of the present study are based on specificvignettes and not on global recollections Thus possible differences in real-world exposure to happiness-eliciting situations are less likely to influence ourfindings than they are to influence more global assessments

For all negative emotion events the profiles were nonparallel3 that is theratings revealed different expectations for men and women The differences areconsistent with the notion that the gender stereotype for emotional expressivenessdoes not assume women to be more expressive for all emotions For examplewomen are not expected to express more disgust and shame in sadness situationsthan are men Also women are expected to react with more contempt than aremen only in disgust guilt and shame situations while for all other situations nodifferences emerge However women are thought to express more sadness fearshame and guilt for all emotion-eliciting situations except for happiness eventsThat is regardless of the emotion theme prevalent in the vignettes women arealways expected to react with more sadness fear shame and guilt

An interesting case regards happiness as a secondary emotion in situationswith a negative core emotion The data reveal that men are typically expected toexperience more happiness in these situations than are women The differencesare strongest for guilt and shame vignettes which involve notions of cheatingand public misbehaviour and might reflect a difference in value structureinherent in the gender stereotype

In sum the results of Study 1 expand our knowledge regarding genderdifferences in emotion stereotypes by considering secondary emotionalresponses as well as modal emotional responses Specifically women are notonly expected to react with more sadness fear shame and guilt in situations forwhich these emotions are central but are expected to do so in all situationsinvolving negative affect Men on the other hand are expected to react withmore anger in a wide variety of situations involving negative affect as well aswith more happiness in some situations involving negative affect This suggeststhat the prevalent emotion stereotype describes womenrsquos predominant emotionalreactions to be more withdrawing (fear and sadness) and self-directed (shameand guilt) whereas menrsquos emotional reactions are seen as more active andaggressive

But to what degree are these general stereotypesexpectations reflected inthe self-perceptions that people have of their own emotional reactions AsJussim et alrsquos (1991) findings show self-perceptions can diverge from thecultural stereotypes Yet Jussim et al also suggest that over time these

3An exception are the shame profiles for the rural sample

622 HESS ET AL

stereotypical beliefs may act as a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy and moveself-perceptions in the direction of being consistent with the stereotype Alsoit is possible that widely held cultural beliefs become prescriptive and thuslead individuals to describe their own behaviour as being in accordance withthe stereotype Gallois (1994) in a review of emotion communication ininterpersonal situations concludes that emotion communication in suchsituations is highly rule-governed A similar perspective underlies Averillrsquos(1997) argument regarding the notion of emotion roles that have entrancerequirements such that for example a successful display of anger presupposessufficient power to adequately address the anger eliciting issue AlsoStoppard and Gruchy (1993) found that individuals anticipate costs andrewards for showing certain emotions in certain contexts Specifically womenexpect more costs when not expressing positive emotions in an lsquolsquootherrsquorsquo-oriented context whereas men expect rewards for showing positive emotionsregardless of context

Taken together these findings from diverse domains suggest that self-perceptions of emotional reactions should show a clear overlap withstereotypical expectations within any particular culture To the degree that weassume that these influences are due to recollection biases we may furtherspeculate that the overlap is less pronounced when asking about behaviouralreactions in particular social contexts than when asking for reactions inlsquolsquogeneralrsquorsquo or independent of a specific social situation Specifically as data onactual behaviour suggest relatively few sex differences in emotional behaviourwhereas the stereotype suggests a wide range of such differences differences inself-perceptions are more likely to be due to the influence of the culturalstereotypes than to actual behavioural differences between the genders Study 2is focused on an analysis of this possibility

STUDY 2

Study 1 confirmed that at least in the Quebec culture there are widely sharedbeliefs concerning how men and women differ in their emotion-relevantexpressive behaviour The central issue to be addressed in Study 2 therefore isthe degree of parallelism that exists between perceptions of how typical malesand females are perceived to respond to emotional events (Study 1) and self-perceptions of onersquos own emotional expressivity

To answer this question men and women drawn from the same population asin Study 1 were asked to indicate for each of the seven types of emotionsituations employed in Study 1 to what degree they expected to react themselveswith each of nine emotions if this event should happen to them In addition weasked participants to indicate the likelihood that they would show each of ninetypes of behaviours corresponding to the nine emotions of the emotion profileThese measures were embedded in a larger questionnaire that assessed beliefs

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 623

regarding emotional reactions of other social groups4 This placement made surethat the cultural beliefs and stereotypes held by the participants regardingemotional expressivity in general were evoked However the specific issue ofsex differences was not alluded to

Method

Participants A total of 360 students attending junior colleges in theMontreal urban region participated in the study Of these only thoseparticipants whose first language learned and still spoken was French whowere born in the province of Quebec (Canada) who had not lived outside ofQuebec for more than five consecutive years and who identified themselvesas either Canadian or Quebecois and not as a member of any other groupwere retained5 The resulting sample consisted of 289 individuals In total163 women and 126 men with a mean age of 1886 years participated ingroups of between 15 and 40 participants Of these 63 men and 85 womencompleted the emotion profiles and 63 men and 78 women completed thebehavioural reactions scale

Procedure Participants were informed of their right to discontinueparticipation at any time and for any reason The experimenter then distributedthe questionnaires The instructions as well as an example were provided on thefirst page The same instructions as employed in Study 1 were used the onlydifference being that participants were told to think about how they would reactand to indicate the likelihood in percent that they themselves would react witheach of the emotionsbehaviours indicated The same instructions were given forboth the emotion profile and the behavioural reactions scale with the onlydifference being that for the latter the word lsquolsquoemotionrsquorsquo was replaced withlsquolsquobehaviourrsquorsquo

Materials For each of seven emotions (happiness anger fear sadnessdisgust shame and guilt) two of the four vignettes employed in Study 1 wereretained Each participant responded to only one vignette for each emotion andvignettes were counterbalanced across participants

4 In the present context only data from the part of the questionnaire asking participants about howthey themselves would react in the described situation will be presented

5These selection criteria were included because the participants for Study 2 were recruited fromseveral Montreal junior colleges with an ethnically diverse population Emotion stereotypes are wellknown to differ between cultures (Kirouac amp Hess 1999) and the participants in Study 1 wererecruited from an ethnically homogenous population To ensure comparability between the twosamples it was therefore necessary to exclude participants from groups not present in the firstsample

624 HESS ET AL

Dependent measures

Emotion profiles These were computed in the same manner as in Study 1That is responses were averaged across the vignettes representing each specificemotion theme

Behavioural reactions scale This scale is intended to assess thebehavioural reactions that are expected for someone who is experiencing theemotional state in question To construct the scale a two-step procedure wasemployed

First 68 students of the University of Quebec at Montreal 54 women and 14men with a mean age of 279 years were asked to list for each of nineemotions (happiness serenity anger disgust fear contempt sadness shameand guilt) the behaviours and observable reactions they associate with eachspecific emotion The answers were compiled into frequency lists andsynonyms were grouped together The three most frequently namedbehaviours for each emotion were retained Due to overlap between someemotions this procedure yielded a list of 22 behaviours For the second step atotal of 44 participants 28 women and 16 men with a mean age of 226years were asked to rate for each behaviour and each of the nine emotionsthe likelihood of observing the behaviour in a person experiencing theemotion using a 7-point scale (1 very unlikely 7 very likely) Behavioursthat received a mean rating of 6 or above for only one emotion comprise thefinal scale

These consisted of the following items6 to laughto get excited (happiness)to trembleto freeze (fear) to hitto insultto criticise (anger) to cryto isolateoneself (sadness) to grimaceto vomit (disgust) to stareto look hard at(contempt) to smileto relaxto contemplate (serenity) to withdrawto loweronersquos headto blush (shame) to justify oneselfto apologise (guilt) On theprofile measure participants were asked to indicate the likelihood as apercentage that they would show each of the behaviours in a situation like theone described in the vignettes

Data analyses Each participant responded to one scenario for each of theseven emotions themes and used only one type of scale As in Study 1 thedata were collapsed over scenarios Because we had responses from morewomen than men for both dependent measures the data for the femaleparticipants were weighted to create equal cell sizes Profile analyses acrossthe nine emotional reactionsbehaviours were conducted to assess sexdifferences

6These items were translated from the original French by the authors

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 625

Results and discussion

As noted earlier the goal of Study 2 was to assess to what degree the self-perceptions of the men and women who participated in this study overlap withthe general stereotypes found in Study 1 To accomplish this the emotionprofiles from Study 1 were compared with the self-reported emotional profilesand with the behavioural reaction profiles collected here

Self-described emotion profiles The means and standard deviations for thenine scales of the emotion profiles for male and female participants arepresented in Table 3 A comparison of these means with those of the profilesfrom Study 1 reveals substantial similarities between the emotional reactionsexpected for oneself and those expected for men and women in general

Behavioral reactions Table 3 shows the means and standard deviations forthe nine behavioural reaction profiles These profiles represent the participantsself-report of the likelihood that they would display these specific behaviours inthe situations described by the vignettes As the focus of this paper is on sex

TABLE 3Means and standard deviations for self-perceptions of emotional reactionsbehaviours

for men and women (Study 2)

Men Women

Situation Mean SD Mean SD

AngerHappiness 262 1224 006 054Laughget excited 790 1826 429 1168Serenity 262 827 135 532Smilerelaxcontemplate 865 2068 435 1185Sadness 2359 2390 4405 3151Cryisolate oneself 935 2083 1825 2250Fear 603 1589 486 1070Tremblefreeze 332 814 630 1155Anger 6268 2873 6076 2928Hitinsultcriticise 3540 3042 2654 2873Disgust 1175 2447 1094 1997Grimacevomit 194 553 286 854Contempt 1865 2505 2102 2543Starelook hard at 2065 2718 1156 2216Shame 286 827 802 1887Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 1044 2187 1038 1642Guilt 349 826 491 1582Justify oneselfapologise 2045 3072 1761 2663

(Continued)

626 HESS ET AL

TABLE 3(Continued)

Men Women

Situation Mean SD Mean SD

DisgustHappiness 611 1714 143 575Laughget excited 1989 2669 915 1825Serenity 611 1855 208 1159Smilerelaxcontemplate 1159t 2113 578 1482Sadness 516 1537 490 1531Cryisolate oneself 073 403 346 1352Fear 373t 1066 911 2018Tremblefreeze 476t 1154 1015 1977Anger 1359 2146 1437 2521Hitinsultcriticise 1214 2210 1186 2151Disgust 5086 3257 5881 3178Grimacevomit 1167 2121 1692 2236Contempt 1798 2226 1750 2706Starelook hard at 1991 2362 1686 2363Shame 1023 1972 1683 2738Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 645 1663 1169 2337Guilt 262 937 119 378Justify oneselfapologise 992 2511 744 1924

SadnessHappiness 317 1280 412 1594Laughget excited 123 789 128 114Serenity 887t 2017 318 1456Smilerelaxcontemplate 621 1848 346 1196Sadness 7690 2816 8251 2258Cryisolate oneself 6008 3131 6736 3059Fear 849t 1820 1546 2637Tremblefreeze 1595 2763 1135 2068Anger 1825 2641 2261 2919Hitinsultcriticise 532 1399 641 1517Disgust 651t 2015 176 940Grimacevomit 790 2017 353 1318Contempt 659 2125 332 1121Starelook hard at 000 000 045 397Shame 214 1050 141 711Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 2008 2916 724 1680Guilt 1524 2494 2141 2985Justify oneselfapologise 315 1065 391 1478

FearHappiness 317 1487 006 054Laughget excited 203 1054 058 361Serenity 587 1698 082 327

(Continued overleaf)

627

TABLE 3(Continued)

Men Women

Situation Mean SD Mean SD

Smilerelaxcontemplate 1048 2243 182 666Sadness 2333 3051 2929 3588Cryisolate oneself 1306 2536 3022 3582Fear 5111 3207 7535 2715Tremblefreeze 2008 2565 3378 3378Anger 2468 3297 1954 2949Hitinsultcriticise 1222 2098 446 1410Disgust 787 1808 1006 2206Grimacevomit 429 1270 365 1115Contempt 1192 2216 1141 2078Starelook hard at 677 1822 391 1405Shame 143 470 200 615Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 1606 2579 1000 2117Guilt 794 2199 369 995Justify oneselfapologise 282 1263 276 1319

ShameHappiness 452 1596 144 1039Laughget excited 1825 2905 1387 1990Serenity 444 1492 182 1028Smilerelaxcontemplate 1206t 2333 623 1262Sadness 1151 2121 2077 2361Cryisolate oneself 334 877 426 1107Fear 1246 2431 1135 1700Tremblefreeze 776 1569 894 1491Anger 1262 2259 1432 2408Hitinsultcriticise 565 1478 314 1140Disgust 206 966 347 1244Grimacevomit 202 590 231 1086Contempt 730 1532 811 1880Starelook hard at 347 833 304 1160Shame 4819 3534 5968 2948Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 2563 2974 2885 2908Guilt 3095 3442 4788 3282Justify oneselfapologise 4379 3144 4256 3074

GuiltHappiness 1024 2432 355 1189Laughget excited 734 2259 584 1761Serenity 262 1008 223 771Smilerelaxcontemplate 645 1692 416 1409Sadness 2003t 2705 2971 3390Cryisolate oneself 960 1992 2273 2979Fear 1778 2667 2653 3305

(Continued)

628

differences we will not discuss these data in detail However two things arenoteworthy First both men and women report lower probabilities that theywould react with a certain behaviour for example lsquolsquoto laughto get excitedrsquorsquothan with the emotion that corresponds to the behaviour (happiness) Thisfinding is not unexpected as individuals do not always express their emotionsoutwardly or may have developed idiosyncratic means of expressing certainemotions Second the profile data for the behaviours resemble strongly theemotional reactions reported For example for anger the highest means arefound for to hitto insultto criticise for to cryto isolate one self and for to stare

TABLE 3(Continued)

Men Women

Situation Mean SD Mean SD

Tremblefreeze 1206 2212 1227 2024Anger 1762 2980 1926 2950Hitinsultcriticise 129 543 221 720Disgust 1248 2569 1152 2402Grimacevomit 581 1642 351 1385Contempt 1603 2857 1464 2611Starelook hard at 129 495 136 485Shame 2667 3227 5375 3467Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 1952 2472 1769 2333Guilt 5071 3885 5753 3372Justify oneselfapologise 4484 3581 4286 3608

HappinessHappiness 8913 1981 9106 1471Laughget excited 5763 3420 6069 3283Serenity 2738t 3650 3906 3797Smilerelaxcontemplate 5451 3445 4647 3432Sadness 127 946 020 123Cryisolate oneself 040 318 029 141Fear 103 372 206 680Tremblefreeze 419t 1313 090 057Anger 032 252 000 000Hitinsultcriticise 000 000 013 114Disgust 048 378 000 000Grimacevomit 000 000 000 000Contempt 081 522 000 000Starelook hard at 355 1392 147 388Shame 111 764 000 000Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 718 1905 687 1859Guilt 270 1526 000 000Justify oneselfapologise 355 1535 090 340

Note Significant differences between men and women tp lt 1 p lt 05 p lt 01 p lt 001

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 629

to look hard at which correspond to anger sadness and contempt reactionsrespectively

However a number of differences between these two types of profiles canalso be observed For example for the emotional reaction profiles for anger andsadness the second highest mean is found for guilt whereas for the behaviouralreaction profiles for these emotions the second highest mean is found for shamebehaviours (to withdrawto lower onersquos headto blush) This findings may be dueto the general confusion between shame and guilt that has been observed forWestern cultures (see eg Wallbott amp Scherer 1994)

Sex differences To assess whether male and female participants differedwith regard to their expected emotional reactions and behaviours in the differentemotion eliciting situations profile analyses were conducted on the ratings foreach emotion situation All analyses and post-hoc tests were conducted at analpha level of 05 The results are shown in Table 4

TABLE 4Results of profile analyses on self-reported likelihood

of emotional reactionsbehaviours for men andwomen (Study 2)

Vignettes F df p

AngerReactions 295 8116 005Behaviours 183 8113 079

DisgustReactions 169 8115 107Behaviours 173 8116 099

FearReactions 330 8116 002Behaviours 390 8116 001

SadnessReactions 207 8116 044Behaviours 170 8115 105

GuiltReactions 186 8117 071Behaviours 130 8115 251

ShameReactions 215 8116 037Behaviours 70 8116 689

HappinessReactions 106 8116 397Behaviours 109 8116 376

630 HESS ET AL

Emotional reactions For all emotion situations except disgust andhappiness the emotional reactions profiles were nonparallel or marginallynonparallel (see Table 4) For the nonparallel profiles post-hoc tests revealedthat a similar pattern of sex differences emerged across the different emotionthemes For happiness and serenity there were either no significant differencesbetween men and women or men reported experiencing these emotions with ahigher probability than did women Conversely for sadness fear shame andguilt there were either no significant sex differences or women reported feelingthese emotions with a higher probability than did men For anger disgust andcontempt reactions no significant differences emerged

Emotional behaviour profiles Only the fear profile was significantlynonparallel (different) for men and women The profiles for anger and disgustwere marginally nonparallel and the remaining profiles were all parallel andcoincident Thus fewer significant differences between menrsquos and womenrsquosexpected behaviours in the situations described by the vignettes were found thanwas the case for the expected emotional reactions in Studies 1 and 2 Yet it isimportant to note that the probabilities reported for the behavioural profiles werelower overall and it is thus possible that this lack of differences is due to a lackof sensitivity of the measure

As postulated based on previous research (eg Crawford Clippax OnyxGault amp Benton 1992) as well as on the emotional reactions profile womenreport a higher probability of either crying or isolating oneself in an angersituation than do men Conversely and in accordance with both the literature onanger expression (see earlier) and the results from the emotional reactionsprofile men report it more likely to hitto insultto criticise than women thoughthis difference is not significant In addition they report that they aresignificantly more likely to stareto look hard (contempt) than do women abehaviour that could also be interpreted as aggressive when shown in responseto an insult

As regards the disgust situations men report that they are more likely tolaughto get excited This sex difference matches the finding for the emotionalreactions profile but was not found in Study 1 Finally for the fear situation menreport that they are more likely to hitto insultto criticise as well as to smiletorelaxto contemplate (serenity) than do women The emotional reactions profilefor fear from this study shows that men report a higher probability of reactingwith serenity but not with anger than do women As these behaviourscorrespond to a macho or cool demeanour in a threatening situation they fit thegeneral stereotype of masculine behaviour Conversely women report to bemore likely to trembleto freeze as well as to cryto isolate one self in fearsituations

In sum although many fewer sex differences reached significance whencomparing self-reported expected behaviours for men and women the pattern of

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 631

results is largely congruent with previous findings Specifically women reporteda higher probability of showing behaviours congruent with sadness and fear thandid men whereas men reported higher probabilities for anger and serenebehaviours In addition men reported a higher probability of showing acontempt behaviour in an anger situation yet the relevant behaviour (to staretolook hard) could be interpreted as aggressive in that context

How congruent are the findings fromStudies 1 and 2

As mentioned earlier not all significant differences found in Study 1 for theexpected reactions for men and women in general were also found for self-reports of expected reactions by men and women for themselves Yet as theresults for the two studies are based on different degrees of freedomsignificance levels cannot be directly compared To assess whether stereotypicaland self-reported sex differences were of similar magnitude we computed theeffect sizes for both studies Table 5 shows Cohenrsquos d for the post-hoc

TABLE 5Cohenrsquos d for sex differences in Studies 1 and 2

Study 1 Study 2

SituationEmotionalreactions

Emotionalreactions

Emotionalbehaviours

AngerHappiness 7023Serenity 7025Sadness 203 073 041Fear 123 030Anger 7055 7030Disgust 068Contempt 7026Shame 117 7035Guilt 129

DisgustHappiness 7032 7037 7047Serenity 7045 7026 7021Sadness 095 027Fear 189 033 033AngerDisgust 160 024 024Contempt 050Shame 062 7028 026Guilt 062 020

(Continued)

632 HESS ET AL

TABLE 5(Continued)

Study 1 Study 2

SituationEmotionalreactions

Emotionalreactions

Emotionalbehaviours

SadnessHappiness 7053Serenity 7032Sadness 184 022 024Fear 171 031Anger 7065 042Disgust 7030 7025Contempt 021Shame 020 7046 054Guilt 176 022 7033

FearHappiness 7021 7030Serenity 7026 7041 7052Sadness 189 055Fear 221 082 046Anger 7084 7043Disgust 067ContemptShame 049 7026Guilt 172 7025

ShameHappiness 7045 7023Serenity 7027 7020 7031Sadness 175 041Fear 128Anger 7069Disgust 065Contempt 054Shame 154 035Guilt 153 050

GuiltHappiness 7107 7035Serenity 7051Sadness 198 032 051Fear 162 029AngerDisgust 128Contempt 075Shame 178 051Guilt 183 020

633

comparisons for each emotion in the profile for the six negative emotionsituations across the two studies For Study 1 the effect sizes for the urban andthe rural sample were combined To facilitate the reading of the table onlydifferences for which d was at least 020 (ie equivalent to a small effect) areshown In general effect sizes for Study 1 are larger than those for Study 2 Foremotional reactions the expected differences between men and women were ofmedium (gt 050) to large (gt 080) size whereas for self-perceptions the expecteddifferences between men and women were small to medium in size

The most stable sex difference across the two studies was found for sadnessboth as a core emotion in sadness vignettes and as a secondary emotion That isfor all negative emotions the general stereotype describes women as reactingwith more sadness and women also perceive themselves as reacting with moresadness andor report more sadness behaviours Further women are expected toreact with (and they self-report) more shame and guilt reactionsbehaviours inshame and guilt situations However for the other negative emotions (angerdisgust sadness and fear) men report higher levels of shame reactions or shamebehaviours (but not both) Finally fear reactions and behaviours are described asmore likely for women in general and women perceive themselves as reactingwith more fear in disgust sadness fear and guilt situations

Another very stable sex difference across studies regards happiness andserenity reactions for negative emotion vignettes Men consistently are bothexpected to react with and self-report more happiness reactions as well ashappiness behaviours for disgust fear and shame vignettes To a lesser degreethis pattern also emerges for sadness and guilt vignettes As mentioned in thediscussion of Study 1 this may reflect differences in the value structure betweenmen and women

In sum a comparison of effect sizes shows considerable consistency acrossthe two studies Specifically noteworthy is the very consistent finding for boththe stereotypical beliefs and the self-reports with regard to sadness reactionswhich are considered as more likely for women than for men for all negativeemotion situations studied

However a number of differences between the general stereotypes and theself-perceptions also emerged specifically with regard to shame reactionsWhereas women are generally believed to be more likely to react with shameto negative emotion events the self-reported likelihood for shame as aconcomitant emotion is higher for men for all situations except for guilt(given the general confusion regarding these states observed in Westerncultures this may be due to shame being a core rather than a concomitantemotion for guilt scenarios) Yet self-reported shame behaviours are morelikely for women than for men in sadness and disgust situations A possibleexplanation is that men are actively trying to not show shame reactionsmdashtoconform to the general stereotypemdashbut are aware that they nonetheless arelikely to feel shame in those situations

634 HESS ET AL

To conclude the general stereotype and self-perceptions of emotionalreactions and behaviours suggest that women react with more sadness to all typesof negative emotion events Further the stereotypes and the self-perceptions arein agreement on menrsquos greater likelihood to react with happiness and serenity to avariety of negative emotions In contrast differences between the generalstereotypes and self-perceptions emerge for shame reactions with men reportingin situations when shame is a secondary emotion a higher likelihood of shamereactions but not necessarily shame behaviours than do women

STUDY 3

The results from Study 2 suggest that the stereotypical beliefs regarding menrsquosand womenrsquos emotional reactions and behaviours in a variety of emotion-inducing situations converge with self-perceptions of menrsquos and womenrsquosemotional reactions and behaviours in those same situations This finding isconsistent with the notion that autobiographic statements that requireparticipants to summarise over a number of related experiences may be biasedby stereotypical expectations (see eg Feldman-Barrett et al 1998) This leadsto the question of whether a similar overlap can also be found for narratives ofsingle specific emotional events from the participantsrsquo past If stereotypesindeed influence the way emotional events are reconstructed in a narrative wewould expect to find that women report more sadness events and express moresadness overall as well as more intense target emotions for all but anger eventsConversely we would expect men to report more situations involving anger aswell as experiencing more happiness and serenity overall

However as Study 3 is based on personal narratives and not on standardisedvignettes such a finding could simply be due to the fact that the emotionantecedent events in a real-life setting differ for men and women To assess thispossibility we decided to measure the emotion antecedent events by means of anappraisal questionnaire that assesses the participantsrsquo perception of the emotionantecedent situation To the degree that perceptions of emotion antecedents aresimilar for men and women while reported emotional reactions differ we canconclude that observed sex differences are not due to differences in theperception of the event per se For example if womenrsquos tendency to report moresadness were due to a difference in the perception of the emotion antecedentsituation we would expect women to report more often that they did not feel thatthey could do anything to change the situation or that they had to adapt to thesituation (as sadness is generally associated with the notion of irrevocable loss)

Overview

For this study we translated and adapted a questionnaire reported by Scherer(1988) that consists of two parts The first part invites the participants todescribe an event during which they experienced an emotion The second part

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 635

asks specific questions regarding the appraisal process We added a section inwhich we asked participants to complete an emotion profile for the event Toavoid the possibility that men and women would relate narratives from widelydifferent types of situations we asked participants to describe an event related tofamily interactions This class of situations should be readily accessible to allparticipants and ensure that emotional events involving human interactionpartners were reported

Allowing participants to choose the type of emotional events they report hasseveral advantages Most importantly we can assess what type of emotionalevents men and women choose to report spontaneously It also permitsparticipants to choose a salient event for which they can recollect theinformation necessary to respond to the appraisal questions On the other handthis approach is unlikely to result in a well-balanced distribution of emotiontopics thus making it difficult or impossible to analyse the data separately fordifferent emotion themes Yet in the context of the present study we were onlyinterested in sex differences in reports and not in absolute levels of responsesStudies 1 and 2 suggest that sex differences are very stable across all negativeemotions We therefore decided to allow participants to choose the emotiontheme and analysed the data collapsed across all negative emotion themes

Method

Participants A total of 171 students 87 men and 84 women with a meanage of 1862 years participated in this study Most of the participants (147) wererecruited from an ethnically homogenous junior college in the larger Montrealurban area (Cegep Lionel-Groulx Ste-Therese Quebec Canada) and partici-pated in groups An additional 24 participants were recruited individually

Procedure The experimenter explained that the study concerned emotionalevents in peoplersquos lives Participants were informed of their right to discontinueparticipation at any time and for any reason The experimenter then distributedthe questionnaires and responded to questions regarding the procedure The tasktook between 10 and 30 minutes Most of this time difference can be attributedto the amount of detail provided in the event description that ranged from acouple of words (eg birth of my daughter) to well over a page

Dependent measures The questionnaire consisted of four parts The firstpart was an open-ended question asking the participants to describe any eventinvolving their family life that led them to experience an emotion Sadnessshame anger guilt joy fear and disgust were provided as examples ofemotions Participants were asked to give a detailed description of the situationincluding the events that led up to it their reactions and those of others presentIn addition they were asked to identify the people involved with respect to their

636 HESS ET AL

relationship with them (eg my partner my sister etc) as well as to identify themain emotion theme of the story This served to ensure that the participantsbased their answers to the following questions on a specific event and not on aclass of similar events

Emotion description The second part of the questionnaire consisted ofquestions regarding when the event happened for how long they felt theemotion and the intensity of the core emotion identified as the emotion theme ofthe story Participants were also asked to indicate whether they tried to hide orcontrol their feelings and to what degree This part also contained the emotionprofile used in Studies 1 and 2 Using this measure participants were asked toindicate to what percentage they had felt each of the nine emotions from theprofile

Appraisal questionnaire A series of questions regarding the appraisal processwere used to assess the emotion antecedent events These questions weretranslated from the questionnaire reported by Scherer (1988) Specificallyparticipants were asked to what degree they had expected the situation to occurhow pleasant or unpleasant they considered the event whether the event helpedor hindered them in achieving their aims to what degree they considered that thesituation or the event that caused the emotion was unjust or unfair whether theevent was caused by their own or by someone elsersquos behaviour to what degreethey considered that the behaviour that caused the event would be judged asimproper or immoral by their acquaintances how the event affected theirfeelings about themselves such as their self-esteem or self-confidence andfinally to what degree the event changed their relationships with the peopleinvolved (all on negative-positive 7-point bipolar scales)

In addition participants were given a list of 11 specific potential causes of theevent (caused it myself natural causes act of god etc) They also evaluatedtheir ability to act upon or to cope with the event and its consequences using ascale involving 5 options The last part of the questionnaire consisted ofquestions regarding the participantsrsquo sex their age and whether they werecurrently seeing someone in a love-based relationship and if so for how long

Results

Of the 171 reported emotion events 147 (74 reported by men and 73 reported bywomen) concerned negative emotional events Of these a total of 62 weresadness events 22 were anger events and 11 were guilt events The remainingevents were distributed over a large number of negative emotions

As expected the very low frequency of reports for specific emotion themesmade separate analyses of reports of these events unfeasible We thereforedecided to perform analyses on the data summed over all negative emotionthemes The 24 events with positive emotion themes were obviously excludedfrom these analyses

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 637

Do women report more sadness events and men more anger events Toaddress this question a chi-square test was performed on the frequency withwhich men and women labeled the reported event as a sad versus an anger eventIn line with the results of Studies 1 and 2 we found men to report more angerevents and women to report more sadness events Specifically 14 men and 8women reported anger events and 25 men and 37 women reported sad events w2

= 355 p = 06 d = 42Do women report more intense core emotions than men For the intensity of

the core emotion experienced during the event women reported significantlyhigher levels (M = 593 SD = 101) than men (M = 554 SD = 123) t(145) =222 p = 028 d = 37

Do women and men report different levels of negative emotions across theemotion profile Figure 2 presents the emotion profiles separately for men andwomen An inspection of the profiles shows that overall men report morehappinessserenity whereas women report higher levels of all other emotionsThe profiles are nonparallel F(8 137) = 5877 p lt 001 Post-hoc analysesrevealed a significant sex difference in self-reported sadness with womenreporting higher levels than men To compare the sex differences in the profiles

Figure 2 Emotion profile for menrsquos and womenrsquos self-reported emotional reactions to negativeemotion events (Study 3)

638 HESS ET AL

found in this study with those from Studies 1 and 2 effect sizes were calculatedUsing the same cut-off point as previously (small effect size d = 020) only twodifferences were found to be stable across the three studies Men report higherlevels of happiness for negative emotion events (d = 7022) and women reporthigher levels of sadness (d = 043) As the latter difference may be due to thehigher frequency of reported sadness events by women we also verified whetherwomen report higher levels of sadness when sadness events are excluded fromthe analysis An inspection of the means revealed a marginally significantdifference in the same direction M = 6472 SD = 3247 and M = 5108 SD =3684 for women and men respectively t(83) = 181 p = 074 d = 40

Are there differences in appraisal patterns between men and women Asmentioned earlier the reported differences in emotional reactions could be dueto differences in the perception of the emotion antecedent events Yet nodifferences in appraisal patterns were found suggesting that emotion antecedentevents were perceived similarly In addition despite the more frequent and moreintense reports of sadness women did not report different coping styles thanmen and did not seem to feel more helpless (38 men vs 34 women report thisreaction) In fact women more frequently report that they felt able to lsquolsquoinfluencethe situation positivelyrsquorsquo (19 women vs 9 men report this reaction though thedifference is not significant)

Discussion

Study 3 extended the study of emotion stereotypes and self-perceptions based onvignettes to narratives of emotional events that the participants had in factexperienced themselves The goal of the study was to investigate whether thefindings from Studies 1 and 2 generalise to such recollections of personal eventsThe results strongly suggest this to be the case Women again report higherlevels of sadness for negative emotion events They also report more sad eventsin general Men on the other hand report more anger events as well as morehappiness for negative emotion events as was found in both Studies 1 and 2 Yetno reported differences in appraisal or coping emerged This suggests that theobserved differences in emotional reactions are not due to a bias in the appraisalprocess nor to an inability to act upon the event

If emotion antecedents do not differ why are differences in emotionalreactions reported We suggest that such differences represent an influence ofthe general emotion stereotype on the narrative reconstruction of a personalevent This conclusion is based on the observation of a null effect and thus opento the critique that the present study lacked the power necessary to detect realdifferences in appraisal between men and women To assess this critique wecalculated the absolute mean effect size for the interval-scaled appraisalquestions to be d = 015 To achieve 80 power a sample of 1100 participantswould be needed These data underscore the very slim differences in appraisals

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 639

between men and women making it highly unlikely that the effects observed inthis study are mediated by a difference in appraisal and thus by a difference inthe perception of the underlying event

CONCLUSIONS

The present series of studies had the goal to assess general emotion stereotypesand their influence on self-perceptions of emotional reactions by men andwomen We wanted to both describe these stereotypes in more detail with regardnot only to the modal emotion for a specific event (such as sadness reactions to aloss) but also with regard to the secondary emotions present in these situationsFurther we wanted to assess to what degree such expectations for men andwomen in general are endorsed by individuals for themselves as well as whetherthey would be spontaneously reported when relating a personally experiencedevent

Two gender differences were found to be stable across all three experimentalparadigms Women are expected to be more likely to react with sadness in allnegative emotion situations they expect themselves to be more likely to reactwith sadness as well as to cry and to withdraw more and finally women reportmore sadness in personal events In contrast men are expected to react withmore happinessserenity during negative emotional situations they expectthemselves to react more frequently this way as well as to laugh and smile moreand to be more relaxed They also tend to report more happiness whendescribing negative personal events

Not all general emotion stereotypes were found in the self-perceptionsstudied in Studies 2 and 3 Specifically according to Study 1 women areexpected to be more likely to react with shame and guilt in all negative emotionsituations Yet women did not expect to do so for themselves in situations otherthan shame and guilt situations and in fact men reported to be more likely toreact with shame in a variety of situations Further men and women did notreport any differences with regard to experiences of shame and guilt during thepersonal events

Study 3 included an appraisal questionnaire to address the question whetherthe self-reported differences in emotionality between men and women are due todifferences in the appraisal of the emotion antecedent events or rather to theinfluence of the prevalent norms No differences in appraisals were detectedsuggesting that the self-reported differences may be due to the normative forcesof the general stereotype rather than to appraisal differences

It may be argued that the Study 3 is based on recollections of past events andthat self-reports of emotional experiences represent after the fact reconstructionsthat differ from the actually experienced emotions during the event (seeParkinson amp Manstead 1993) A related argument may be made for Study 2where participants had to estimate the likelihood of their emotional reactions to

640 HESS ET AL

hypothetical events (even though the latter were chosen to be common everydayevents) This may well be true Yet the question remains why did men andwomen reconstruct the events differently in terms of their emotional reactionsThe answer would then be that the prevalent emotion stereotype which islargely endorsed by the population studied influenced this reconstruction Yetas peoplesrsquo sense of self depends on their past histories this would imply thatreconstructions of emotional events in line with emotion stereotypes mayeventually lead individuals to conform more closely to these stereotypes as theybecome more and more part of their emotional history and eventually of theiremotional self

Manuscript received 30 May 1997Revised manuscript received 23 February 2000

REFERENCES

Adams S Kuebli J Boyle PA amp Fivush R (1995) Gender differences in parent-childconversations about past emotions A longitudinal investigation Sex Roles 33 309ndash323

Allen JG amp Haccoun DM (1976) Sex differences in emotionality A multidimensional approachHuman Relations 29 711ndash722

Averill JR (1997) The emotions An integrative approach In R Hogan JA Johnson amp SRBriggs (Eds) Handbook of personality psychology (pp 513ndash541) San Diego CA AcademicPress

Birnbaum DW (1983) Preschoolersrsquo stereotypes about sex differences in emotionality Areaffirmation Journal of Genetic Psychology 143 139ndash140

Briton NJ amp Hall JA (1995) Gender-based expectancies and observer judgements of smilingJournal of Nonverbal Behavior 19 49ndash65

Brody LR amp Hall JA (1993) Gender and emotion In M Lewis amp JM Haviland (Eds)Handbook of emotions (pp 447-460) New York Guilford Press

Crawford J Clippax S Onyx J Gault U amp Benton P (1992) Emotion and genderConstructing meaning from memory London Sage

Dunn J Bretherton I amp Munn P (1987) Conversations about feeling states between mothers andtheir children Developmental Psychology 23 132ndash139

Eagly AH amp Mladinic A (1989) Gender stereotypes and attitudes toward women and menPersonality and Social Psychology Bulletin 15 543ndash558

Ekman P amp Friesen W (1986) A new pan-cultural facial expression of emotion Motivation andEmotion 10 159ndash168

Feldman-Barrett L Robin L Pietromonaco PR amp Eysell KM (1998) Are women the moreemotional sex Evidence from emotional experiences in social context Cognition and Emotion12 555ndash578

Fernandez-Dols J-M amp Ruiz-Belda M-A (1995) Are smiles a sign of happiness Gold medalwinners at the Olympic Games Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 69 1113ndash1119

Fischer A (1993) Sex differences in emotionality Fact or stereotype Feminism and Psychology 3303ndash318

Fivush R (1989) Exploring differences in the emotional content of mother child conversationsabout the past Sex Roles 20 675ndash691

Frank MG amp Ekman P (1993) Not all smiles are created equal The differences betweenenjoyment and nonenjoymen t smiles [Special Issue Current issues in psychological humorresearch] Humor International Journal of Humor Research 6 9ndash26

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 641

Gallois C (1994) Group membership social rules and power A social psychologica l perspectiveon emotional communication Journal of Pragmatics 22 301ndash324

Hall JA (1984) Nonverbal sex differences Communication accuracy and expressive styleBaltimore MD Johns Hopkins University Press

Izard C (1972) Patterns of emotions A new analysis of anxiety and depression New YorkAcademic Press

Jussim L Milbourn M amp Nelson W (1991) Emotional openness Sex-role stereotypes and self-perceptions Representative Research in Social Psychology 19 35ndash52

Kirouac G amp Hess U (1999) Group membership and the decoding of nonverbal behavior In PPhilippot R Feldman amp E Coats (Eds) The social context of nonverbal behavior (pp 182ndash210) New York Cambridge University Press

Kring AM amp Gordon AH (1998) Sex differences in emotion Expression experience andphysiology Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74 686ndash703

LaFrance M amp Banaji M (1992) Toward a reconsideration of the gender-emotion relationship InMS Clark (Ed) Emotion and social behavior Review of personality and social psychology(Vol 14 pp 178ndash201) Newbury Park CA Sage

LaFrance M amp Hecht MA (1995) Why smiles generate leniency Personality and SocialPsychology Bulletin 21 207ndash214

Lazarus RS (1991) Emotion and adaptation Oxford UK Oxford University PressParkinson B amp Manstead ASR (1993) Making sense of emotion in stories and social life

Cognition and Emotion 7 295ndash323Plutchik R (1980) Emotion A psychoevolutionar y synthesis New York Harper amp RowRime B Mesquita B Philippot P amp Boca S (1991) Beyond the emotional event Six studies on

the social sharing of emotion Cognition and Emotion 5 435ndash465Scherer KR (1988) Appendix C Questionnaire used in the International Survey on Emotion

Antecedents and Reactions (ISEAR) In KR Scherer (Ed) Facets of emotion Recent researchHillsdale NJ Erlbaum

Sherman JW amp Bessenhoff GR (1999) Stereotypes as source monitoring cues On theinteraction between episodic and semantic memory Psychological Science 10 106ndash110

Stoppard JM amp Gruchy CD (1993) Gender context and expression of positive emotionPersonality and Social Psychology Bulletin 19 143ndash150

Tucker JS amp Riggio RE (1988) The role of social skills in encoding posed and spontaneousfacial expressions Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 12 87ndash97

Wallbott HG amp Scherer KR (1994) Cultural determinants in experiencing shame and guilt InJune Price Tangney amp Kurt W Fischer (Eds) Self conscious emotions The psychology of shameand guilt embarrasment and pride (pp 465ndash487) New York Guilford Press

642 HESS ET AL

shame situations For happiness the profiles for both genders were parallel andcoincident suggesting that raters not only expected the same pattern of reactionsfrom men and women but also at the same level for each emotion

Discussion

In summary the analyses of the emotion profiles suggest the presence of clearexpectancies regarding not only the core emotion for a given type of situationbut also for the secondary emotional reactions that are expected in the situationAlthough the profiles for men and women are relatively similar with regard totheir major features a number of systematic differences in expectationsregarding menrsquos and womenrsquos emotional reactions emerged for the negativeemotion events but not for the positive

This latter finding is in contrast to the literature on the self-reportedfrequency of happiness expressionsexperiences in men and women (eg Allenamp Haccoun 1976) and with the finding that women are both believed and

TABLE 2Results of profile analyses on expected emotionalreactions for men and women in general (Study 1)

Vignettes F df p

AngerUrban 532 8175 001Rural 333 8169 001

DisgustUrban 507 8175 001Rural 461 8169 001

FearUrban 689 8187 001Rural 294 8163 004

SadnessUrban 489 8187 001Rural 267 8163 009

GuiltUrban 414 8173 001Rural 288 8167 005

ShameUrban 277 8173 007Rural 156 8167 140 (ns)

HappinessUrban 174 8273 090 (ns)Rural 127 8255 257 (ns)

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 621

observed to smile more than men (Briton amp Hall 1995) However given themultiple functions of smiles (see eg Fernandez-Dols amp Ruiz-Belda 1995Frank amp Ekman 1993 LaFrance amp Hecht 1995) differences in smiling may notreflect differences in happiness One explanation for this lack of continuity withthe existing literature is that the results of the present study are based on specificvignettes and not on global recollections Thus possible differences in real-world exposure to happiness-eliciting situations are less likely to influence ourfindings than they are to influence more global assessments

For all negative emotion events the profiles were nonparallel3 that is theratings revealed different expectations for men and women The differences areconsistent with the notion that the gender stereotype for emotional expressivenessdoes not assume women to be more expressive for all emotions For examplewomen are not expected to express more disgust and shame in sadness situationsthan are men Also women are expected to react with more contempt than aremen only in disgust guilt and shame situations while for all other situations nodifferences emerge However women are thought to express more sadness fearshame and guilt for all emotion-eliciting situations except for happiness eventsThat is regardless of the emotion theme prevalent in the vignettes women arealways expected to react with more sadness fear shame and guilt

An interesting case regards happiness as a secondary emotion in situationswith a negative core emotion The data reveal that men are typically expected toexperience more happiness in these situations than are women The differencesare strongest for guilt and shame vignettes which involve notions of cheatingand public misbehaviour and might reflect a difference in value structureinherent in the gender stereotype

In sum the results of Study 1 expand our knowledge regarding genderdifferences in emotion stereotypes by considering secondary emotionalresponses as well as modal emotional responses Specifically women are notonly expected to react with more sadness fear shame and guilt in situations forwhich these emotions are central but are expected to do so in all situationsinvolving negative affect Men on the other hand are expected to react withmore anger in a wide variety of situations involving negative affect as well aswith more happiness in some situations involving negative affect This suggeststhat the prevalent emotion stereotype describes womenrsquos predominant emotionalreactions to be more withdrawing (fear and sadness) and self-directed (shameand guilt) whereas menrsquos emotional reactions are seen as more active andaggressive

But to what degree are these general stereotypesexpectations reflected inthe self-perceptions that people have of their own emotional reactions AsJussim et alrsquos (1991) findings show self-perceptions can diverge from thecultural stereotypes Yet Jussim et al also suggest that over time these

3An exception are the shame profiles for the rural sample

622 HESS ET AL

stereotypical beliefs may act as a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy and moveself-perceptions in the direction of being consistent with the stereotype Alsoit is possible that widely held cultural beliefs become prescriptive and thuslead individuals to describe their own behaviour as being in accordance withthe stereotype Gallois (1994) in a review of emotion communication ininterpersonal situations concludes that emotion communication in suchsituations is highly rule-governed A similar perspective underlies Averillrsquos(1997) argument regarding the notion of emotion roles that have entrancerequirements such that for example a successful display of anger presupposessufficient power to adequately address the anger eliciting issue AlsoStoppard and Gruchy (1993) found that individuals anticipate costs andrewards for showing certain emotions in certain contexts Specifically womenexpect more costs when not expressing positive emotions in an lsquolsquootherrsquorsquo-oriented context whereas men expect rewards for showing positive emotionsregardless of context

Taken together these findings from diverse domains suggest that self-perceptions of emotional reactions should show a clear overlap withstereotypical expectations within any particular culture To the degree that weassume that these influences are due to recollection biases we may furtherspeculate that the overlap is less pronounced when asking about behaviouralreactions in particular social contexts than when asking for reactions inlsquolsquogeneralrsquorsquo or independent of a specific social situation Specifically as data onactual behaviour suggest relatively few sex differences in emotional behaviourwhereas the stereotype suggests a wide range of such differences differences inself-perceptions are more likely to be due to the influence of the culturalstereotypes than to actual behavioural differences between the genders Study 2is focused on an analysis of this possibility

STUDY 2

Study 1 confirmed that at least in the Quebec culture there are widely sharedbeliefs concerning how men and women differ in their emotion-relevantexpressive behaviour The central issue to be addressed in Study 2 therefore isthe degree of parallelism that exists between perceptions of how typical malesand females are perceived to respond to emotional events (Study 1) and self-perceptions of onersquos own emotional expressivity

To answer this question men and women drawn from the same population asin Study 1 were asked to indicate for each of the seven types of emotionsituations employed in Study 1 to what degree they expected to react themselveswith each of nine emotions if this event should happen to them In addition weasked participants to indicate the likelihood that they would show each of ninetypes of behaviours corresponding to the nine emotions of the emotion profileThese measures were embedded in a larger questionnaire that assessed beliefs

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 623

regarding emotional reactions of other social groups4 This placement made surethat the cultural beliefs and stereotypes held by the participants regardingemotional expressivity in general were evoked However the specific issue ofsex differences was not alluded to

Method

Participants A total of 360 students attending junior colleges in theMontreal urban region participated in the study Of these only thoseparticipants whose first language learned and still spoken was French whowere born in the province of Quebec (Canada) who had not lived outside ofQuebec for more than five consecutive years and who identified themselvesas either Canadian or Quebecois and not as a member of any other groupwere retained5 The resulting sample consisted of 289 individuals In total163 women and 126 men with a mean age of 1886 years participated ingroups of between 15 and 40 participants Of these 63 men and 85 womencompleted the emotion profiles and 63 men and 78 women completed thebehavioural reactions scale

Procedure Participants were informed of their right to discontinueparticipation at any time and for any reason The experimenter then distributedthe questionnaires The instructions as well as an example were provided on thefirst page The same instructions as employed in Study 1 were used the onlydifference being that participants were told to think about how they would reactand to indicate the likelihood in percent that they themselves would react witheach of the emotionsbehaviours indicated The same instructions were given forboth the emotion profile and the behavioural reactions scale with the onlydifference being that for the latter the word lsquolsquoemotionrsquorsquo was replaced withlsquolsquobehaviourrsquorsquo

Materials For each of seven emotions (happiness anger fear sadnessdisgust shame and guilt) two of the four vignettes employed in Study 1 wereretained Each participant responded to only one vignette for each emotion andvignettes were counterbalanced across participants

4 In the present context only data from the part of the questionnaire asking participants about howthey themselves would react in the described situation will be presented

5These selection criteria were included because the participants for Study 2 were recruited fromseveral Montreal junior colleges with an ethnically diverse population Emotion stereotypes are wellknown to differ between cultures (Kirouac amp Hess 1999) and the participants in Study 1 wererecruited from an ethnically homogenous population To ensure comparability between the twosamples it was therefore necessary to exclude participants from groups not present in the firstsample

624 HESS ET AL

Dependent measures

Emotion profiles These were computed in the same manner as in Study 1That is responses were averaged across the vignettes representing each specificemotion theme

Behavioural reactions scale This scale is intended to assess thebehavioural reactions that are expected for someone who is experiencing theemotional state in question To construct the scale a two-step procedure wasemployed

First 68 students of the University of Quebec at Montreal 54 women and 14men with a mean age of 279 years were asked to list for each of nineemotions (happiness serenity anger disgust fear contempt sadness shameand guilt) the behaviours and observable reactions they associate with eachspecific emotion The answers were compiled into frequency lists andsynonyms were grouped together The three most frequently namedbehaviours for each emotion were retained Due to overlap between someemotions this procedure yielded a list of 22 behaviours For the second step atotal of 44 participants 28 women and 16 men with a mean age of 226years were asked to rate for each behaviour and each of the nine emotionsthe likelihood of observing the behaviour in a person experiencing theemotion using a 7-point scale (1 very unlikely 7 very likely) Behavioursthat received a mean rating of 6 or above for only one emotion comprise thefinal scale

These consisted of the following items6 to laughto get excited (happiness)to trembleto freeze (fear) to hitto insultto criticise (anger) to cryto isolateoneself (sadness) to grimaceto vomit (disgust) to stareto look hard at(contempt) to smileto relaxto contemplate (serenity) to withdrawto loweronersquos headto blush (shame) to justify oneselfto apologise (guilt) On theprofile measure participants were asked to indicate the likelihood as apercentage that they would show each of the behaviours in a situation like theone described in the vignettes

Data analyses Each participant responded to one scenario for each of theseven emotions themes and used only one type of scale As in Study 1 thedata were collapsed over scenarios Because we had responses from morewomen than men for both dependent measures the data for the femaleparticipants were weighted to create equal cell sizes Profile analyses acrossthe nine emotional reactionsbehaviours were conducted to assess sexdifferences

6These items were translated from the original French by the authors

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 625

Results and discussion

As noted earlier the goal of Study 2 was to assess to what degree the self-perceptions of the men and women who participated in this study overlap withthe general stereotypes found in Study 1 To accomplish this the emotionprofiles from Study 1 were compared with the self-reported emotional profilesand with the behavioural reaction profiles collected here

Self-described emotion profiles The means and standard deviations for thenine scales of the emotion profiles for male and female participants arepresented in Table 3 A comparison of these means with those of the profilesfrom Study 1 reveals substantial similarities between the emotional reactionsexpected for oneself and those expected for men and women in general

Behavioral reactions Table 3 shows the means and standard deviations forthe nine behavioural reaction profiles These profiles represent the participantsself-report of the likelihood that they would display these specific behaviours inthe situations described by the vignettes As the focus of this paper is on sex

TABLE 3Means and standard deviations for self-perceptions of emotional reactionsbehaviours

for men and women (Study 2)

Men Women

Situation Mean SD Mean SD

AngerHappiness 262 1224 006 054Laughget excited 790 1826 429 1168Serenity 262 827 135 532Smilerelaxcontemplate 865 2068 435 1185Sadness 2359 2390 4405 3151Cryisolate oneself 935 2083 1825 2250Fear 603 1589 486 1070Tremblefreeze 332 814 630 1155Anger 6268 2873 6076 2928Hitinsultcriticise 3540 3042 2654 2873Disgust 1175 2447 1094 1997Grimacevomit 194 553 286 854Contempt 1865 2505 2102 2543Starelook hard at 2065 2718 1156 2216Shame 286 827 802 1887Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 1044 2187 1038 1642Guilt 349 826 491 1582Justify oneselfapologise 2045 3072 1761 2663

(Continued)

626 HESS ET AL

TABLE 3(Continued)

Men Women

Situation Mean SD Mean SD

DisgustHappiness 611 1714 143 575Laughget excited 1989 2669 915 1825Serenity 611 1855 208 1159Smilerelaxcontemplate 1159t 2113 578 1482Sadness 516 1537 490 1531Cryisolate oneself 073 403 346 1352Fear 373t 1066 911 2018Tremblefreeze 476t 1154 1015 1977Anger 1359 2146 1437 2521Hitinsultcriticise 1214 2210 1186 2151Disgust 5086 3257 5881 3178Grimacevomit 1167 2121 1692 2236Contempt 1798 2226 1750 2706Starelook hard at 1991 2362 1686 2363Shame 1023 1972 1683 2738Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 645 1663 1169 2337Guilt 262 937 119 378Justify oneselfapologise 992 2511 744 1924

SadnessHappiness 317 1280 412 1594Laughget excited 123 789 128 114Serenity 887t 2017 318 1456Smilerelaxcontemplate 621 1848 346 1196Sadness 7690 2816 8251 2258Cryisolate oneself 6008 3131 6736 3059Fear 849t 1820 1546 2637Tremblefreeze 1595 2763 1135 2068Anger 1825 2641 2261 2919Hitinsultcriticise 532 1399 641 1517Disgust 651t 2015 176 940Grimacevomit 790 2017 353 1318Contempt 659 2125 332 1121Starelook hard at 000 000 045 397Shame 214 1050 141 711Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 2008 2916 724 1680Guilt 1524 2494 2141 2985Justify oneselfapologise 315 1065 391 1478

FearHappiness 317 1487 006 054Laughget excited 203 1054 058 361Serenity 587 1698 082 327

(Continued overleaf)

627

TABLE 3(Continued)

Men Women

Situation Mean SD Mean SD

Smilerelaxcontemplate 1048 2243 182 666Sadness 2333 3051 2929 3588Cryisolate oneself 1306 2536 3022 3582Fear 5111 3207 7535 2715Tremblefreeze 2008 2565 3378 3378Anger 2468 3297 1954 2949Hitinsultcriticise 1222 2098 446 1410Disgust 787 1808 1006 2206Grimacevomit 429 1270 365 1115Contempt 1192 2216 1141 2078Starelook hard at 677 1822 391 1405Shame 143 470 200 615Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 1606 2579 1000 2117Guilt 794 2199 369 995Justify oneselfapologise 282 1263 276 1319

ShameHappiness 452 1596 144 1039Laughget excited 1825 2905 1387 1990Serenity 444 1492 182 1028Smilerelaxcontemplate 1206t 2333 623 1262Sadness 1151 2121 2077 2361Cryisolate oneself 334 877 426 1107Fear 1246 2431 1135 1700Tremblefreeze 776 1569 894 1491Anger 1262 2259 1432 2408Hitinsultcriticise 565 1478 314 1140Disgust 206 966 347 1244Grimacevomit 202 590 231 1086Contempt 730 1532 811 1880Starelook hard at 347 833 304 1160Shame 4819 3534 5968 2948Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 2563 2974 2885 2908Guilt 3095 3442 4788 3282Justify oneselfapologise 4379 3144 4256 3074

GuiltHappiness 1024 2432 355 1189Laughget excited 734 2259 584 1761Serenity 262 1008 223 771Smilerelaxcontemplate 645 1692 416 1409Sadness 2003t 2705 2971 3390Cryisolate oneself 960 1992 2273 2979Fear 1778 2667 2653 3305

(Continued)

628

differences we will not discuss these data in detail However two things arenoteworthy First both men and women report lower probabilities that theywould react with a certain behaviour for example lsquolsquoto laughto get excitedrsquorsquothan with the emotion that corresponds to the behaviour (happiness) Thisfinding is not unexpected as individuals do not always express their emotionsoutwardly or may have developed idiosyncratic means of expressing certainemotions Second the profile data for the behaviours resemble strongly theemotional reactions reported For example for anger the highest means arefound for to hitto insultto criticise for to cryto isolate one self and for to stare

TABLE 3(Continued)

Men Women

Situation Mean SD Mean SD

Tremblefreeze 1206 2212 1227 2024Anger 1762 2980 1926 2950Hitinsultcriticise 129 543 221 720Disgust 1248 2569 1152 2402Grimacevomit 581 1642 351 1385Contempt 1603 2857 1464 2611Starelook hard at 129 495 136 485Shame 2667 3227 5375 3467Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 1952 2472 1769 2333Guilt 5071 3885 5753 3372Justify oneselfapologise 4484 3581 4286 3608

HappinessHappiness 8913 1981 9106 1471Laughget excited 5763 3420 6069 3283Serenity 2738t 3650 3906 3797Smilerelaxcontemplate 5451 3445 4647 3432Sadness 127 946 020 123Cryisolate oneself 040 318 029 141Fear 103 372 206 680Tremblefreeze 419t 1313 090 057Anger 032 252 000 000Hitinsultcriticise 000 000 013 114Disgust 048 378 000 000Grimacevomit 000 000 000 000Contempt 081 522 000 000Starelook hard at 355 1392 147 388Shame 111 764 000 000Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 718 1905 687 1859Guilt 270 1526 000 000Justify oneselfapologise 355 1535 090 340

Note Significant differences between men and women tp lt 1 p lt 05 p lt 01 p lt 001

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 629

to look hard at which correspond to anger sadness and contempt reactionsrespectively

However a number of differences between these two types of profiles canalso be observed For example for the emotional reaction profiles for anger andsadness the second highest mean is found for guilt whereas for the behaviouralreaction profiles for these emotions the second highest mean is found for shamebehaviours (to withdrawto lower onersquos headto blush) This findings may be dueto the general confusion between shame and guilt that has been observed forWestern cultures (see eg Wallbott amp Scherer 1994)

Sex differences To assess whether male and female participants differedwith regard to their expected emotional reactions and behaviours in the differentemotion eliciting situations profile analyses were conducted on the ratings foreach emotion situation All analyses and post-hoc tests were conducted at analpha level of 05 The results are shown in Table 4

TABLE 4Results of profile analyses on self-reported likelihood

of emotional reactionsbehaviours for men andwomen (Study 2)

Vignettes F df p

AngerReactions 295 8116 005Behaviours 183 8113 079

DisgustReactions 169 8115 107Behaviours 173 8116 099

FearReactions 330 8116 002Behaviours 390 8116 001

SadnessReactions 207 8116 044Behaviours 170 8115 105

GuiltReactions 186 8117 071Behaviours 130 8115 251

ShameReactions 215 8116 037Behaviours 70 8116 689

HappinessReactions 106 8116 397Behaviours 109 8116 376

630 HESS ET AL

Emotional reactions For all emotion situations except disgust andhappiness the emotional reactions profiles were nonparallel or marginallynonparallel (see Table 4) For the nonparallel profiles post-hoc tests revealedthat a similar pattern of sex differences emerged across the different emotionthemes For happiness and serenity there were either no significant differencesbetween men and women or men reported experiencing these emotions with ahigher probability than did women Conversely for sadness fear shame andguilt there were either no significant sex differences or women reported feelingthese emotions with a higher probability than did men For anger disgust andcontempt reactions no significant differences emerged

Emotional behaviour profiles Only the fear profile was significantlynonparallel (different) for men and women The profiles for anger and disgustwere marginally nonparallel and the remaining profiles were all parallel andcoincident Thus fewer significant differences between menrsquos and womenrsquosexpected behaviours in the situations described by the vignettes were found thanwas the case for the expected emotional reactions in Studies 1 and 2 Yet it isimportant to note that the probabilities reported for the behavioural profiles werelower overall and it is thus possible that this lack of differences is due to a lackof sensitivity of the measure

As postulated based on previous research (eg Crawford Clippax OnyxGault amp Benton 1992) as well as on the emotional reactions profile womenreport a higher probability of either crying or isolating oneself in an angersituation than do men Conversely and in accordance with both the literature onanger expression (see earlier) and the results from the emotional reactionsprofile men report it more likely to hitto insultto criticise than women thoughthis difference is not significant In addition they report that they aresignificantly more likely to stareto look hard (contempt) than do women abehaviour that could also be interpreted as aggressive when shown in responseto an insult

As regards the disgust situations men report that they are more likely tolaughto get excited This sex difference matches the finding for the emotionalreactions profile but was not found in Study 1 Finally for the fear situation menreport that they are more likely to hitto insultto criticise as well as to smiletorelaxto contemplate (serenity) than do women The emotional reactions profilefor fear from this study shows that men report a higher probability of reactingwith serenity but not with anger than do women As these behaviourscorrespond to a macho or cool demeanour in a threatening situation they fit thegeneral stereotype of masculine behaviour Conversely women report to bemore likely to trembleto freeze as well as to cryto isolate one self in fearsituations

In sum although many fewer sex differences reached significance whencomparing self-reported expected behaviours for men and women the pattern of

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 631

results is largely congruent with previous findings Specifically women reporteda higher probability of showing behaviours congruent with sadness and fear thandid men whereas men reported higher probabilities for anger and serenebehaviours In addition men reported a higher probability of showing acontempt behaviour in an anger situation yet the relevant behaviour (to staretolook hard) could be interpreted as aggressive in that context

How congruent are the findings fromStudies 1 and 2

As mentioned earlier not all significant differences found in Study 1 for theexpected reactions for men and women in general were also found for self-reports of expected reactions by men and women for themselves Yet as theresults for the two studies are based on different degrees of freedomsignificance levels cannot be directly compared To assess whether stereotypicaland self-reported sex differences were of similar magnitude we computed theeffect sizes for both studies Table 5 shows Cohenrsquos d for the post-hoc

TABLE 5Cohenrsquos d for sex differences in Studies 1 and 2

Study 1 Study 2

SituationEmotionalreactions

Emotionalreactions

Emotionalbehaviours

AngerHappiness 7023Serenity 7025Sadness 203 073 041Fear 123 030Anger 7055 7030Disgust 068Contempt 7026Shame 117 7035Guilt 129

DisgustHappiness 7032 7037 7047Serenity 7045 7026 7021Sadness 095 027Fear 189 033 033AngerDisgust 160 024 024Contempt 050Shame 062 7028 026Guilt 062 020

(Continued)

632 HESS ET AL

TABLE 5(Continued)

Study 1 Study 2

SituationEmotionalreactions

Emotionalreactions

Emotionalbehaviours

SadnessHappiness 7053Serenity 7032Sadness 184 022 024Fear 171 031Anger 7065 042Disgust 7030 7025Contempt 021Shame 020 7046 054Guilt 176 022 7033

FearHappiness 7021 7030Serenity 7026 7041 7052Sadness 189 055Fear 221 082 046Anger 7084 7043Disgust 067ContemptShame 049 7026Guilt 172 7025

ShameHappiness 7045 7023Serenity 7027 7020 7031Sadness 175 041Fear 128Anger 7069Disgust 065Contempt 054Shame 154 035Guilt 153 050

GuiltHappiness 7107 7035Serenity 7051Sadness 198 032 051Fear 162 029AngerDisgust 128Contempt 075Shame 178 051Guilt 183 020

633

comparisons for each emotion in the profile for the six negative emotionsituations across the two studies For Study 1 the effect sizes for the urban andthe rural sample were combined To facilitate the reading of the table onlydifferences for which d was at least 020 (ie equivalent to a small effect) areshown In general effect sizes for Study 1 are larger than those for Study 2 Foremotional reactions the expected differences between men and women were ofmedium (gt 050) to large (gt 080) size whereas for self-perceptions the expecteddifferences between men and women were small to medium in size

The most stable sex difference across the two studies was found for sadnessboth as a core emotion in sadness vignettes and as a secondary emotion That isfor all negative emotions the general stereotype describes women as reactingwith more sadness and women also perceive themselves as reacting with moresadness andor report more sadness behaviours Further women are expected toreact with (and they self-report) more shame and guilt reactionsbehaviours inshame and guilt situations However for the other negative emotions (angerdisgust sadness and fear) men report higher levels of shame reactions or shamebehaviours (but not both) Finally fear reactions and behaviours are described asmore likely for women in general and women perceive themselves as reactingwith more fear in disgust sadness fear and guilt situations

Another very stable sex difference across studies regards happiness andserenity reactions for negative emotion vignettes Men consistently are bothexpected to react with and self-report more happiness reactions as well ashappiness behaviours for disgust fear and shame vignettes To a lesser degreethis pattern also emerges for sadness and guilt vignettes As mentioned in thediscussion of Study 1 this may reflect differences in the value structure betweenmen and women

In sum a comparison of effect sizes shows considerable consistency acrossthe two studies Specifically noteworthy is the very consistent finding for boththe stereotypical beliefs and the self-reports with regard to sadness reactionswhich are considered as more likely for women than for men for all negativeemotion situations studied

However a number of differences between the general stereotypes and theself-perceptions also emerged specifically with regard to shame reactionsWhereas women are generally believed to be more likely to react with shameto negative emotion events the self-reported likelihood for shame as aconcomitant emotion is higher for men for all situations except for guilt(given the general confusion regarding these states observed in Westerncultures this may be due to shame being a core rather than a concomitantemotion for guilt scenarios) Yet self-reported shame behaviours are morelikely for women than for men in sadness and disgust situations A possibleexplanation is that men are actively trying to not show shame reactionsmdashtoconform to the general stereotypemdashbut are aware that they nonetheless arelikely to feel shame in those situations

634 HESS ET AL

To conclude the general stereotype and self-perceptions of emotionalreactions and behaviours suggest that women react with more sadness to all typesof negative emotion events Further the stereotypes and the self-perceptions arein agreement on menrsquos greater likelihood to react with happiness and serenity to avariety of negative emotions In contrast differences between the generalstereotypes and self-perceptions emerge for shame reactions with men reportingin situations when shame is a secondary emotion a higher likelihood of shamereactions but not necessarily shame behaviours than do women

STUDY 3

The results from Study 2 suggest that the stereotypical beliefs regarding menrsquosand womenrsquos emotional reactions and behaviours in a variety of emotion-inducing situations converge with self-perceptions of menrsquos and womenrsquosemotional reactions and behaviours in those same situations This finding isconsistent with the notion that autobiographic statements that requireparticipants to summarise over a number of related experiences may be biasedby stereotypical expectations (see eg Feldman-Barrett et al 1998) This leadsto the question of whether a similar overlap can also be found for narratives ofsingle specific emotional events from the participantsrsquo past If stereotypesindeed influence the way emotional events are reconstructed in a narrative wewould expect to find that women report more sadness events and express moresadness overall as well as more intense target emotions for all but anger eventsConversely we would expect men to report more situations involving anger aswell as experiencing more happiness and serenity overall

However as Study 3 is based on personal narratives and not on standardisedvignettes such a finding could simply be due to the fact that the emotionantecedent events in a real-life setting differ for men and women To assess thispossibility we decided to measure the emotion antecedent events by means of anappraisal questionnaire that assesses the participantsrsquo perception of the emotionantecedent situation To the degree that perceptions of emotion antecedents aresimilar for men and women while reported emotional reactions differ we canconclude that observed sex differences are not due to differences in theperception of the event per se For example if womenrsquos tendency to report moresadness were due to a difference in the perception of the emotion antecedentsituation we would expect women to report more often that they did not feel thatthey could do anything to change the situation or that they had to adapt to thesituation (as sadness is generally associated with the notion of irrevocable loss)

Overview

For this study we translated and adapted a questionnaire reported by Scherer(1988) that consists of two parts The first part invites the participants todescribe an event during which they experienced an emotion The second part

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 635

asks specific questions regarding the appraisal process We added a section inwhich we asked participants to complete an emotion profile for the event Toavoid the possibility that men and women would relate narratives from widelydifferent types of situations we asked participants to describe an event related tofamily interactions This class of situations should be readily accessible to allparticipants and ensure that emotional events involving human interactionpartners were reported

Allowing participants to choose the type of emotional events they report hasseveral advantages Most importantly we can assess what type of emotionalevents men and women choose to report spontaneously It also permitsparticipants to choose a salient event for which they can recollect theinformation necessary to respond to the appraisal questions On the other handthis approach is unlikely to result in a well-balanced distribution of emotiontopics thus making it difficult or impossible to analyse the data separately fordifferent emotion themes Yet in the context of the present study we were onlyinterested in sex differences in reports and not in absolute levels of responsesStudies 1 and 2 suggest that sex differences are very stable across all negativeemotions We therefore decided to allow participants to choose the emotiontheme and analysed the data collapsed across all negative emotion themes

Method

Participants A total of 171 students 87 men and 84 women with a meanage of 1862 years participated in this study Most of the participants (147) wererecruited from an ethnically homogenous junior college in the larger Montrealurban area (Cegep Lionel-Groulx Ste-Therese Quebec Canada) and partici-pated in groups An additional 24 participants were recruited individually

Procedure The experimenter explained that the study concerned emotionalevents in peoplersquos lives Participants were informed of their right to discontinueparticipation at any time and for any reason The experimenter then distributedthe questionnaires and responded to questions regarding the procedure The tasktook between 10 and 30 minutes Most of this time difference can be attributedto the amount of detail provided in the event description that ranged from acouple of words (eg birth of my daughter) to well over a page

Dependent measures The questionnaire consisted of four parts The firstpart was an open-ended question asking the participants to describe any eventinvolving their family life that led them to experience an emotion Sadnessshame anger guilt joy fear and disgust were provided as examples ofemotions Participants were asked to give a detailed description of the situationincluding the events that led up to it their reactions and those of others presentIn addition they were asked to identify the people involved with respect to their

636 HESS ET AL

relationship with them (eg my partner my sister etc) as well as to identify themain emotion theme of the story This served to ensure that the participantsbased their answers to the following questions on a specific event and not on aclass of similar events

Emotion description The second part of the questionnaire consisted ofquestions regarding when the event happened for how long they felt theemotion and the intensity of the core emotion identified as the emotion theme ofthe story Participants were also asked to indicate whether they tried to hide orcontrol their feelings and to what degree This part also contained the emotionprofile used in Studies 1 and 2 Using this measure participants were asked toindicate to what percentage they had felt each of the nine emotions from theprofile

Appraisal questionnaire A series of questions regarding the appraisal processwere used to assess the emotion antecedent events These questions weretranslated from the questionnaire reported by Scherer (1988) Specificallyparticipants were asked to what degree they had expected the situation to occurhow pleasant or unpleasant they considered the event whether the event helpedor hindered them in achieving their aims to what degree they considered that thesituation or the event that caused the emotion was unjust or unfair whether theevent was caused by their own or by someone elsersquos behaviour to what degreethey considered that the behaviour that caused the event would be judged asimproper or immoral by their acquaintances how the event affected theirfeelings about themselves such as their self-esteem or self-confidence andfinally to what degree the event changed their relationships with the peopleinvolved (all on negative-positive 7-point bipolar scales)

In addition participants were given a list of 11 specific potential causes of theevent (caused it myself natural causes act of god etc) They also evaluatedtheir ability to act upon or to cope with the event and its consequences using ascale involving 5 options The last part of the questionnaire consisted ofquestions regarding the participantsrsquo sex their age and whether they werecurrently seeing someone in a love-based relationship and if so for how long

Results

Of the 171 reported emotion events 147 (74 reported by men and 73 reported bywomen) concerned negative emotional events Of these a total of 62 weresadness events 22 were anger events and 11 were guilt events The remainingevents were distributed over a large number of negative emotions

As expected the very low frequency of reports for specific emotion themesmade separate analyses of reports of these events unfeasible We thereforedecided to perform analyses on the data summed over all negative emotionthemes The 24 events with positive emotion themes were obviously excludedfrom these analyses

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 637

Do women report more sadness events and men more anger events Toaddress this question a chi-square test was performed on the frequency withwhich men and women labeled the reported event as a sad versus an anger eventIn line with the results of Studies 1 and 2 we found men to report more angerevents and women to report more sadness events Specifically 14 men and 8women reported anger events and 25 men and 37 women reported sad events w2

= 355 p = 06 d = 42Do women report more intense core emotions than men For the intensity of

the core emotion experienced during the event women reported significantlyhigher levels (M = 593 SD = 101) than men (M = 554 SD = 123) t(145) =222 p = 028 d = 37

Do women and men report different levels of negative emotions across theemotion profile Figure 2 presents the emotion profiles separately for men andwomen An inspection of the profiles shows that overall men report morehappinessserenity whereas women report higher levels of all other emotionsThe profiles are nonparallel F(8 137) = 5877 p lt 001 Post-hoc analysesrevealed a significant sex difference in self-reported sadness with womenreporting higher levels than men To compare the sex differences in the profiles

Figure 2 Emotion profile for menrsquos and womenrsquos self-reported emotional reactions to negativeemotion events (Study 3)

638 HESS ET AL

found in this study with those from Studies 1 and 2 effect sizes were calculatedUsing the same cut-off point as previously (small effect size d = 020) only twodifferences were found to be stable across the three studies Men report higherlevels of happiness for negative emotion events (d = 7022) and women reporthigher levels of sadness (d = 043) As the latter difference may be due to thehigher frequency of reported sadness events by women we also verified whetherwomen report higher levels of sadness when sadness events are excluded fromthe analysis An inspection of the means revealed a marginally significantdifference in the same direction M = 6472 SD = 3247 and M = 5108 SD =3684 for women and men respectively t(83) = 181 p = 074 d = 40

Are there differences in appraisal patterns between men and women Asmentioned earlier the reported differences in emotional reactions could be dueto differences in the perception of the emotion antecedent events Yet nodifferences in appraisal patterns were found suggesting that emotion antecedentevents were perceived similarly In addition despite the more frequent and moreintense reports of sadness women did not report different coping styles thanmen and did not seem to feel more helpless (38 men vs 34 women report thisreaction) In fact women more frequently report that they felt able to lsquolsquoinfluencethe situation positivelyrsquorsquo (19 women vs 9 men report this reaction though thedifference is not significant)

Discussion

Study 3 extended the study of emotion stereotypes and self-perceptions based onvignettes to narratives of emotional events that the participants had in factexperienced themselves The goal of the study was to investigate whether thefindings from Studies 1 and 2 generalise to such recollections of personal eventsThe results strongly suggest this to be the case Women again report higherlevels of sadness for negative emotion events They also report more sad eventsin general Men on the other hand report more anger events as well as morehappiness for negative emotion events as was found in both Studies 1 and 2 Yetno reported differences in appraisal or coping emerged This suggests that theobserved differences in emotional reactions are not due to a bias in the appraisalprocess nor to an inability to act upon the event

If emotion antecedents do not differ why are differences in emotionalreactions reported We suggest that such differences represent an influence ofthe general emotion stereotype on the narrative reconstruction of a personalevent This conclusion is based on the observation of a null effect and thus opento the critique that the present study lacked the power necessary to detect realdifferences in appraisal between men and women To assess this critique wecalculated the absolute mean effect size for the interval-scaled appraisalquestions to be d = 015 To achieve 80 power a sample of 1100 participantswould be needed These data underscore the very slim differences in appraisals

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 639

between men and women making it highly unlikely that the effects observed inthis study are mediated by a difference in appraisal and thus by a difference inthe perception of the underlying event

CONCLUSIONS

The present series of studies had the goal to assess general emotion stereotypesand their influence on self-perceptions of emotional reactions by men andwomen We wanted to both describe these stereotypes in more detail with regardnot only to the modal emotion for a specific event (such as sadness reactions to aloss) but also with regard to the secondary emotions present in these situationsFurther we wanted to assess to what degree such expectations for men andwomen in general are endorsed by individuals for themselves as well as whetherthey would be spontaneously reported when relating a personally experiencedevent

Two gender differences were found to be stable across all three experimentalparadigms Women are expected to be more likely to react with sadness in allnegative emotion situations they expect themselves to be more likely to reactwith sadness as well as to cry and to withdraw more and finally women reportmore sadness in personal events In contrast men are expected to react withmore happinessserenity during negative emotional situations they expectthemselves to react more frequently this way as well as to laugh and smile moreand to be more relaxed They also tend to report more happiness whendescribing negative personal events

Not all general emotion stereotypes were found in the self-perceptionsstudied in Studies 2 and 3 Specifically according to Study 1 women areexpected to be more likely to react with shame and guilt in all negative emotionsituations Yet women did not expect to do so for themselves in situations otherthan shame and guilt situations and in fact men reported to be more likely toreact with shame in a variety of situations Further men and women did notreport any differences with regard to experiences of shame and guilt during thepersonal events

Study 3 included an appraisal questionnaire to address the question whetherthe self-reported differences in emotionality between men and women are due todifferences in the appraisal of the emotion antecedent events or rather to theinfluence of the prevalent norms No differences in appraisals were detectedsuggesting that the self-reported differences may be due to the normative forcesof the general stereotype rather than to appraisal differences

It may be argued that the Study 3 is based on recollections of past events andthat self-reports of emotional experiences represent after the fact reconstructionsthat differ from the actually experienced emotions during the event (seeParkinson amp Manstead 1993) A related argument may be made for Study 2where participants had to estimate the likelihood of their emotional reactions to

640 HESS ET AL

hypothetical events (even though the latter were chosen to be common everydayevents) This may well be true Yet the question remains why did men andwomen reconstruct the events differently in terms of their emotional reactionsThe answer would then be that the prevalent emotion stereotype which islargely endorsed by the population studied influenced this reconstruction Yetas peoplesrsquo sense of self depends on their past histories this would imply thatreconstructions of emotional events in line with emotion stereotypes mayeventually lead individuals to conform more closely to these stereotypes as theybecome more and more part of their emotional history and eventually of theiremotional self

Manuscript received 30 May 1997Revised manuscript received 23 February 2000

REFERENCES

Adams S Kuebli J Boyle PA amp Fivush R (1995) Gender differences in parent-childconversations about past emotions A longitudinal investigation Sex Roles 33 309ndash323

Allen JG amp Haccoun DM (1976) Sex differences in emotionality A multidimensional approachHuman Relations 29 711ndash722

Averill JR (1997) The emotions An integrative approach In R Hogan JA Johnson amp SRBriggs (Eds) Handbook of personality psychology (pp 513ndash541) San Diego CA AcademicPress

Birnbaum DW (1983) Preschoolersrsquo stereotypes about sex differences in emotionality Areaffirmation Journal of Genetic Psychology 143 139ndash140

Briton NJ amp Hall JA (1995) Gender-based expectancies and observer judgements of smilingJournal of Nonverbal Behavior 19 49ndash65

Brody LR amp Hall JA (1993) Gender and emotion In M Lewis amp JM Haviland (Eds)Handbook of emotions (pp 447-460) New York Guilford Press

Crawford J Clippax S Onyx J Gault U amp Benton P (1992) Emotion and genderConstructing meaning from memory London Sage

Dunn J Bretherton I amp Munn P (1987) Conversations about feeling states between mothers andtheir children Developmental Psychology 23 132ndash139

Eagly AH amp Mladinic A (1989) Gender stereotypes and attitudes toward women and menPersonality and Social Psychology Bulletin 15 543ndash558

Ekman P amp Friesen W (1986) A new pan-cultural facial expression of emotion Motivation andEmotion 10 159ndash168

Feldman-Barrett L Robin L Pietromonaco PR amp Eysell KM (1998) Are women the moreemotional sex Evidence from emotional experiences in social context Cognition and Emotion12 555ndash578

Fernandez-Dols J-M amp Ruiz-Belda M-A (1995) Are smiles a sign of happiness Gold medalwinners at the Olympic Games Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 69 1113ndash1119

Fischer A (1993) Sex differences in emotionality Fact or stereotype Feminism and Psychology 3303ndash318

Fivush R (1989) Exploring differences in the emotional content of mother child conversationsabout the past Sex Roles 20 675ndash691

Frank MG amp Ekman P (1993) Not all smiles are created equal The differences betweenenjoyment and nonenjoymen t smiles [Special Issue Current issues in psychological humorresearch] Humor International Journal of Humor Research 6 9ndash26

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 641

Gallois C (1994) Group membership social rules and power A social psychologica l perspectiveon emotional communication Journal of Pragmatics 22 301ndash324

Hall JA (1984) Nonverbal sex differences Communication accuracy and expressive styleBaltimore MD Johns Hopkins University Press

Izard C (1972) Patterns of emotions A new analysis of anxiety and depression New YorkAcademic Press

Jussim L Milbourn M amp Nelson W (1991) Emotional openness Sex-role stereotypes and self-perceptions Representative Research in Social Psychology 19 35ndash52

Kirouac G amp Hess U (1999) Group membership and the decoding of nonverbal behavior In PPhilippot R Feldman amp E Coats (Eds) The social context of nonverbal behavior (pp 182ndash210) New York Cambridge University Press

Kring AM amp Gordon AH (1998) Sex differences in emotion Expression experience andphysiology Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74 686ndash703

LaFrance M amp Banaji M (1992) Toward a reconsideration of the gender-emotion relationship InMS Clark (Ed) Emotion and social behavior Review of personality and social psychology(Vol 14 pp 178ndash201) Newbury Park CA Sage

LaFrance M amp Hecht MA (1995) Why smiles generate leniency Personality and SocialPsychology Bulletin 21 207ndash214

Lazarus RS (1991) Emotion and adaptation Oxford UK Oxford University PressParkinson B amp Manstead ASR (1993) Making sense of emotion in stories and social life

Cognition and Emotion 7 295ndash323Plutchik R (1980) Emotion A psychoevolutionar y synthesis New York Harper amp RowRime B Mesquita B Philippot P amp Boca S (1991) Beyond the emotional event Six studies on

the social sharing of emotion Cognition and Emotion 5 435ndash465Scherer KR (1988) Appendix C Questionnaire used in the International Survey on Emotion

Antecedents and Reactions (ISEAR) In KR Scherer (Ed) Facets of emotion Recent researchHillsdale NJ Erlbaum

Sherman JW amp Bessenhoff GR (1999) Stereotypes as source monitoring cues On theinteraction between episodic and semantic memory Psychological Science 10 106ndash110

Stoppard JM amp Gruchy CD (1993) Gender context and expression of positive emotionPersonality and Social Psychology Bulletin 19 143ndash150

Tucker JS amp Riggio RE (1988) The role of social skills in encoding posed and spontaneousfacial expressions Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 12 87ndash97

Wallbott HG amp Scherer KR (1994) Cultural determinants in experiencing shame and guilt InJune Price Tangney amp Kurt W Fischer (Eds) Self conscious emotions The psychology of shameand guilt embarrasment and pride (pp 465ndash487) New York Guilford Press

642 HESS ET AL

observed to smile more than men (Briton amp Hall 1995) However given themultiple functions of smiles (see eg Fernandez-Dols amp Ruiz-Belda 1995Frank amp Ekman 1993 LaFrance amp Hecht 1995) differences in smiling may notreflect differences in happiness One explanation for this lack of continuity withthe existing literature is that the results of the present study are based on specificvignettes and not on global recollections Thus possible differences in real-world exposure to happiness-eliciting situations are less likely to influence ourfindings than they are to influence more global assessments

For all negative emotion events the profiles were nonparallel3 that is theratings revealed different expectations for men and women The differences areconsistent with the notion that the gender stereotype for emotional expressivenessdoes not assume women to be more expressive for all emotions For examplewomen are not expected to express more disgust and shame in sadness situationsthan are men Also women are expected to react with more contempt than aremen only in disgust guilt and shame situations while for all other situations nodifferences emerge However women are thought to express more sadness fearshame and guilt for all emotion-eliciting situations except for happiness eventsThat is regardless of the emotion theme prevalent in the vignettes women arealways expected to react with more sadness fear shame and guilt

An interesting case regards happiness as a secondary emotion in situationswith a negative core emotion The data reveal that men are typically expected toexperience more happiness in these situations than are women The differencesare strongest for guilt and shame vignettes which involve notions of cheatingand public misbehaviour and might reflect a difference in value structureinherent in the gender stereotype

In sum the results of Study 1 expand our knowledge regarding genderdifferences in emotion stereotypes by considering secondary emotionalresponses as well as modal emotional responses Specifically women are notonly expected to react with more sadness fear shame and guilt in situations forwhich these emotions are central but are expected to do so in all situationsinvolving negative affect Men on the other hand are expected to react withmore anger in a wide variety of situations involving negative affect as well aswith more happiness in some situations involving negative affect This suggeststhat the prevalent emotion stereotype describes womenrsquos predominant emotionalreactions to be more withdrawing (fear and sadness) and self-directed (shameand guilt) whereas menrsquos emotional reactions are seen as more active andaggressive

But to what degree are these general stereotypesexpectations reflected inthe self-perceptions that people have of their own emotional reactions AsJussim et alrsquos (1991) findings show self-perceptions can diverge from thecultural stereotypes Yet Jussim et al also suggest that over time these

3An exception are the shame profiles for the rural sample

622 HESS ET AL

stereotypical beliefs may act as a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy and moveself-perceptions in the direction of being consistent with the stereotype Alsoit is possible that widely held cultural beliefs become prescriptive and thuslead individuals to describe their own behaviour as being in accordance withthe stereotype Gallois (1994) in a review of emotion communication ininterpersonal situations concludes that emotion communication in suchsituations is highly rule-governed A similar perspective underlies Averillrsquos(1997) argument regarding the notion of emotion roles that have entrancerequirements such that for example a successful display of anger presupposessufficient power to adequately address the anger eliciting issue AlsoStoppard and Gruchy (1993) found that individuals anticipate costs andrewards for showing certain emotions in certain contexts Specifically womenexpect more costs when not expressing positive emotions in an lsquolsquootherrsquorsquo-oriented context whereas men expect rewards for showing positive emotionsregardless of context

Taken together these findings from diverse domains suggest that self-perceptions of emotional reactions should show a clear overlap withstereotypical expectations within any particular culture To the degree that weassume that these influences are due to recollection biases we may furtherspeculate that the overlap is less pronounced when asking about behaviouralreactions in particular social contexts than when asking for reactions inlsquolsquogeneralrsquorsquo or independent of a specific social situation Specifically as data onactual behaviour suggest relatively few sex differences in emotional behaviourwhereas the stereotype suggests a wide range of such differences differences inself-perceptions are more likely to be due to the influence of the culturalstereotypes than to actual behavioural differences between the genders Study 2is focused on an analysis of this possibility

STUDY 2

Study 1 confirmed that at least in the Quebec culture there are widely sharedbeliefs concerning how men and women differ in their emotion-relevantexpressive behaviour The central issue to be addressed in Study 2 therefore isthe degree of parallelism that exists between perceptions of how typical malesand females are perceived to respond to emotional events (Study 1) and self-perceptions of onersquos own emotional expressivity

To answer this question men and women drawn from the same population asin Study 1 were asked to indicate for each of the seven types of emotionsituations employed in Study 1 to what degree they expected to react themselveswith each of nine emotions if this event should happen to them In addition weasked participants to indicate the likelihood that they would show each of ninetypes of behaviours corresponding to the nine emotions of the emotion profileThese measures were embedded in a larger questionnaire that assessed beliefs

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 623

regarding emotional reactions of other social groups4 This placement made surethat the cultural beliefs and stereotypes held by the participants regardingemotional expressivity in general were evoked However the specific issue ofsex differences was not alluded to

Method

Participants A total of 360 students attending junior colleges in theMontreal urban region participated in the study Of these only thoseparticipants whose first language learned and still spoken was French whowere born in the province of Quebec (Canada) who had not lived outside ofQuebec for more than five consecutive years and who identified themselvesas either Canadian or Quebecois and not as a member of any other groupwere retained5 The resulting sample consisted of 289 individuals In total163 women and 126 men with a mean age of 1886 years participated ingroups of between 15 and 40 participants Of these 63 men and 85 womencompleted the emotion profiles and 63 men and 78 women completed thebehavioural reactions scale

Procedure Participants were informed of their right to discontinueparticipation at any time and for any reason The experimenter then distributedthe questionnaires The instructions as well as an example were provided on thefirst page The same instructions as employed in Study 1 were used the onlydifference being that participants were told to think about how they would reactand to indicate the likelihood in percent that they themselves would react witheach of the emotionsbehaviours indicated The same instructions were given forboth the emotion profile and the behavioural reactions scale with the onlydifference being that for the latter the word lsquolsquoemotionrsquorsquo was replaced withlsquolsquobehaviourrsquorsquo

Materials For each of seven emotions (happiness anger fear sadnessdisgust shame and guilt) two of the four vignettes employed in Study 1 wereretained Each participant responded to only one vignette for each emotion andvignettes were counterbalanced across participants

4 In the present context only data from the part of the questionnaire asking participants about howthey themselves would react in the described situation will be presented

5These selection criteria were included because the participants for Study 2 were recruited fromseveral Montreal junior colleges with an ethnically diverse population Emotion stereotypes are wellknown to differ between cultures (Kirouac amp Hess 1999) and the participants in Study 1 wererecruited from an ethnically homogenous population To ensure comparability between the twosamples it was therefore necessary to exclude participants from groups not present in the firstsample

624 HESS ET AL

Dependent measures

Emotion profiles These were computed in the same manner as in Study 1That is responses were averaged across the vignettes representing each specificemotion theme

Behavioural reactions scale This scale is intended to assess thebehavioural reactions that are expected for someone who is experiencing theemotional state in question To construct the scale a two-step procedure wasemployed

First 68 students of the University of Quebec at Montreal 54 women and 14men with a mean age of 279 years were asked to list for each of nineemotions (happiness serenity anger disgust fear contempt sadness shameand guilt) the behaviours and observable reactions they associate with eachspecific emotion The answers were compiled into frequency lists andsynonyms were grouped together The three most frequently namedbehaviours for each emotion were retained Due to overlap between someemotions this procedure yielded a list of 22 behaviours For the second step atotal of 44 participants 28 women and 16 men with a mean age of 226years were asked to rate for each behaviour and each of the nine emotionsthe likelihood of observing the behaviour in a person experiencing theemotion using a 7-point scale (1 very unlikely 7 very likely) Behavioursthat received a mean rating of 6 or above for only one emotion comprise thefinal scale

These consisted of the following items6 to laughto get excited (happiness)to trembleto freeze (fear) to hitto insultto criticise (anger) to cryto isolateoneself (sadness) to grimaceto vomit (disgust) to stareto look hard at(contempt) to smileto relaxto contemplate (serenity) to withdrawto loweronersquos headto blush (shame) to justify oneselfto apologise (guilt) On theprofile measure participants were asked to indicate the likelihood as apercentage that they would show each of the behaviours in a situation like theone described in the vignettes

Data analyses Each participant responded to one scenario for each of theseven emotions themes and used only one type of scale As in Study 1 thedata were collapsed over scenarios Because we had responses from morewomen than men for both dependent measures the data for the femaleparticipants were weighted to create equal cell sizes Profile analyses acrossthe nine emotional reactionsbehaviours were conducted to assess sexdifferences

6These items were translated from the original French by the authors

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 625

Results and discussion

As noted earlier the goal of Study 2 was to assess to what degree the self-perceptions of the men and women who participated in this study overlap withthe general stereotypes found in Study 1 To accomplish this the emotionprofiles from Study 1 were compared with the self-reported emotional profilesand with the behavioural reaction profiles collected here

Self-described emotion profiles The means and standard deviations for thenine scales of the emotion profiles for male and female participants arepresented in Table 3 A comparison of these means with those of the profilesfrom Study 1 reveals substantial similarities between the emotional reactionsexpected for oneself and those expected for men and women in general

Behavioral reactions Table 3 shows the means and standard deviations forthe nine behavioural reaction profiles These profiles represent the participantsself-report of the likelihood that they would display these specific behaviours inthe situations described by the vignettes As the focus of this paper is on sex

TABLE 3Means and standard deviations for self-perceptions of emotional reactionsbehaviours

for men and women (Study 2)

Men Women

Situation Mean SD Mean SD

AngerHappiness 262 1224 006 054Laughget excited 790 1826 429 1168Serenity 262 827 135 532Smilerelaxcontemplate 865 2068 435 1185Sadness 2359 2390 4405 3151Cryisolate oneself 935 2083 1825 2250Fear 603 1589 486 1070Tremblefreeze 332 814 630 1155Anger 6268 2873 6076 2928Hitinsultcriticise 3540 3042 2654 2873Disgust 1175 2447 1094 1997Grimacevomit 194 553 286 854Contempt 1865 2505 2102 2543Starelook hard at 2065 2718 1156 2216Shame 286 827 802 1887Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 1044 2187 1038 1642Guilt 349 826 491 1582Justify oneselfapologise 2045 3072 1761 2663

(Continued)

626 HESS ET AL

TABLE 3(Continued)

Men Women

Situation Mean SD Mean SD

DisgustHappiness 611 1714 143 575Laughget excited 1989 2669 915 1825Serenity 611 1855 208 1159Smilerelaxcontemplate 1159t 2113 578 1482Sadness 516 1537 490 1531Cryisolate oneself 073 403 346 1352Fear 373t 1066 911 2018Tremblefreeze 476t 1154 1015 1977Anger 1359 2146 1437 2521Hitinsultcriticise 1214 2210 1186 2151Disgust 5086 3257 5881 3178Grimacevomit 1167 2121 1692 2236Contempt 1798 2226 1750 2706Starelook hard at 1991 2362 1686 2363Shame 1023 1972 1683 2738Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 645 1663 1169 2337Guilt 262 937 119 378Justify oneselfapologise 992 2511 744 1924

SadnessHappiness 317 1280 412 1594Laughget excited 123 789 128 114Serenity 887t 2017 318 1456Smilerelaxcontemplate 621 1848 346 1196Sadness 7690 2816 8251 2258Cryisolate oneself 6008 3131 6736 3059Fear 849t 1820 1546 2637Tremblefreeze 1595 2763 1135 2068Anger 1825 2641 2261 2919Hitinsultcriticise 532 1399 641 1517Disgust 651t 2015 176 940Grimacevomit 790 2017 353 1318Contempt 659 2125 332 1121Starelook hard at 000 000 045 397Shame 214 1050 141 711Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 2008 2916 724 1680Guilt 1524 2494 2141 2985Justify oneselfapologise 315 1065 391 1478

FearHappiness 317 1487 006 054Laughget excited 203 1054 058 361Serenity 587 1698 082 327

(Continued overleaf)

627

TABLE 3(Continued)

Men Women

Situation Mean SD Mean SD

Smilerelaxcontemplate 1048 2243 182 666Sadness 2333 3051 2929 3588Cryisolate oneself 1306 2536 3022 3582Fear 5111 3207 7535 2715Tremblefreeze 2008 2565 3378 3378Anger 2468 3297 1954 2949Hitinsultcriticise 1222 2098 446 1410Disgust 787 1808 1006 2206Grimacevomit 429 1270 365 1115Contempt 1192 2216 1141 2078Starelook hard at 677 1822 391 1405Shame 143 470 200 615Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 1606 2579 1000 2117Guilt 794 2199 369 995Justify oneselfapologise 282 1263 276 1319

ShameHappiness 452 1596 144 1039Laughget excited 1825 2905 1387 1990Serenity 444 1492 182 1028Smilerelaxcontemplate 1206t 2333 623 1262Sadness 1151 2121 2077 2361Cryisolate oneself 334 877 426 1107Fear 1246 2431 1135 1700Tremblefreeze 776 1569 894 1491Anger 1262 2259 1432 2408Hitinsultcriticise 565 1478 314 1140Disgust 206 966 347 1244Grimacevomit 202 590 231 1086Contempt 730 1532 811 1880Starelook hard at 347 833 304 1160Shame 4819 3534 5968 2948Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 2563 2974 2885 2908Guilt 3095 3442 4788 3282Justify oneselfapologise 4379 3144 4256 3074

GuiltHappiness 1024 2432 355 1189Laughget excited 734 2259 584 1761Serenity 262 1008 223 771Smilerelaxcontemplate 645 1692 416 1409Sadness 2003t 2705 2971 3390Cryisolate oneself 960 1992 2273 2979Fear 1778 2667 2653 3305

(Continued)

628

differences we will not discuss these data in detail However two things arenoteworthy First both men and women report lower probabilities that theywould react with a certain behaviour for example lsquolsquoto laughto get excitedrsquorsquothan with the emotion that corresponds to the behaviour (happiness) Thisfinding is not unexpected as individuals do not always express their emotionsoutwardly or may have developed idiosyncratic means of expressing certainemotions Second the profile data for the behaviours resemble strongly theemotional reactions reported For example for anger the highest means arefound for to hitto insultto criticise for to cryto isolate one self and for to stare

TABLE 3(Continued)

Men Women

Situation Mean SD Mean SD

Tremblefreeze 1206 2212 1227 2024Anger 1762 2980 1926 2950Hitinsultcriticise 129 543 221 720Disgust 1248 2569 1152 2402Grimacevomit 581 1642 351 1385Contempt 1603 2857 1464 2611Starelook hard at 129 495 136 485Shame 2667 3227 5375 3467Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 1952 2472 1769 2333Guilt 5071 3885 5753 3372Justify oneselfapologise 4484 3581 4286 3608

HappinessHappiness 8913 1981 9106 1471Laughget excited 5763 3420 6069 3283Serenity 2738t 3650 3906 3797Smilerelaxcontemplate 5451 3445 4647 3432Sadness 127 946 020 123Cryisolate oneself 040 318 029 141Fear 103 372 206 680Tremblefreeze 419t 1313 090 057Anger 032 252 000 000Hitinsultcriticise 000 000 013 114Disgust 048 378 000 000Grimacevomit 000 000 000 000Contempt 081 522 000 000Starelook hard at 355 1392 147 388Shame 111 764 000 000Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 718 1905 687 1859Guilt 270 1526 000 000Justify oneselfapologise 355 1535 090 340

Note Significant differences between men and women tp lt 1 p lt 05 p lt 01 p lt 001

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 629

to look hard at which correspond to anger sadness and contempt reactionsrespectively

However a number of differences between these two types of profiles canalso be observed For example for the emotional reaction profiles for anger andsadness the second highest mean is found for guilt whereas for the behaviouralreaction profiles for these emotions the second highest mean is found for shamebehaviours (to withdrawto lower onersquos headto blush) This findings may be dueto the general confusion between shame and guilt that has been observed forWestern cultures (see eg Wallbott amp Scherer 1994)

Sex differences To assess whether male and female participants differedwith regard to their expected emotional reactions and behaviours in the differentemotion eliciting situations profile analyses were conducted on the ratings foreach emotion situation All analyses and post-hoc tests were conducted at analpha level of 05 The results are shown in Table 4

TABLE 4Results of profile analyses on self-reported likelihood

of emotional reactionsbehaviours for men andwomen (Study 2)

Vignettes F df p

AngerReactions 295 8116 005Behaviours 183 8113 079

DisgustReactions 169 8115 107Behaviours 173 8116 099

FearReactions 330 8116 002Behaviours 390 8116 001

SadnessReactions 207 8116 044Behaviours 170 8115 105

GuiltReactions 186 8117 071Behaviours 130 8115 251

ShameReactions 215 8116 037Behaviours 70 8116 689

HappinessReactions 106 8116 397Behaviours 109 8116 376

630 HESS ET AL

Emotional reactions For all emotion situations except disgust andhappiness the emotional reactions profiles were nonparallel or marginallynonparallel (see Table 4) For the nonparallel profiles post-hoc tests revealedthat a similar pattern of sex differences emerged across the different emotionthemes For happiness and serenity there were either no significant differencesbetween men and women or men reported experiencing these emotions with ahigher probability than did women Conversely for sadness fear shame andguilt there were either no significant sex differences or women reported feelingthese emotions with a higher probability than did men For anger disgust andcontempt reactions no significant differences emerged

Emotional behaviour profiles Only the fear profile was significantlynonparallel (different) for men and women The profiles for anger and disgustwere marginally nonparallel and the remaining profiles were all parallel andcoincident Thus fewer significant differences between menrsquos and womenrsquosexpected behaviours in the situations described by the vignettes were found thanwas the case for the expected emotional reactions in Studies 1 and 2 Yet it isimportant to note that the probabilities reported for the behavioural profiles werelower overall and it is thus possible that this lack of differences is due to a lackof sensitivity of the measure

As postulated based on previous research (eg Crawford Clippax OnyxGault amp Benton 1992) as well as on the emotional reactions profile womenreport a higher probability of either crying or isolating oneself in an angersituation than do men Conversely and in accordance with both the literature onanger expression (see earlier) and the results from the emotional reactionsprofile men report it more likely to hitto insultto criticise than women thoughthis difference is not significant In addition they report that they aresignificantly more likely to stareto look hard (contempt) than do women abehaviour that could also be interpreted as aggressive when shown in responseto an insult

As regards the disgust situations men report that they are more likely tolaughto get excited This sex difference matches the finding for the emotionalreactions profile but was not found in Study 1 Finally for the fear situation menreport that they are more likely to hitto insultto criticise as well as to smiletorelaxto contemplate (serenity) than do women The emotional reactions profilefor fear from this study shows that men report a higher probability of reactingwith serenity but not with anger than do women As these behaviourscorrespond to a macho or cool demeanour in a threatening situation they fit thegeneral stereotype of masculine behaviour Conversely women report to bemore likely to trembleto freeze as well as to cryto isolate one self in fearsituations

In sum although many fewer sex differences reached significance whencomparing self-reported expected behaviours for men and women the pattern of

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 631

results is largely congruent with previous findings Specifically women reporteda higher probability of showing behaviours congruent with sadness and fear thandid men whereas men reported higher probabilities for anger and serenebehaviours In addition men reported a higher probability of showing acontempt behaviour in an anger situation yet the relevant behaviour (to staretolook hard) could be interpreted as aggressive in that context

How congruent are the findings fromStudies 1 and 2

As mentioned earlier not all significant differences found in Study 1 for theexpected reactions for men and women in general were also found for self-reports of expected reactions by men and women for themselves Yet as theresults for the two studies are based on different degrees of freedomsignificance levels cannot be directly compared To assess whether stereotypicaland self-reported sex differences were of similar magnitude we computed theeffect sizes for both studies Table 5 shows Cohenrsquos d for the post-hoc

TABLE 5Cohenrsquos d for sex differences in Studies 1 and 2

Study 1 Study 2

SituationEmotionalreactions

Emotionalreactions

Emotionalbehaviours

AngerHappiness 7023Serenity 7025Sadness 203 073 041Fear 123 030Anger 7055 7030Disgust 068Contempt 7026Shame 117 7035Guilt 129

DisgustHappiness 7032 7037 7047Serenity 7045 7026 7021Sadness 095 027Fear 189 033 033AngerDisgust 160 024 024Contempt 050Shame 062 7028 026Guilt 062 020

(Continued)

632 HESS ET AL

TABLE 5(Continued)

Study 1 Study 2

SituationEmotionalreactions

Emotionalreactions

Emotionalbehaviours

SadnessHappiness 7053Serenity 7032Sadness 184 022 024Fear 171 031Anger 7065 042Disgust 7030 7025Contempt 021Shame 020 7046 054Guilt 176 022 7033

FearHappiness 7021 7030Serenity 7026 7041 7052Sadness 189 055Fear 221 082 046Anger 7084 7043Disgust 067ContemptShame 049 7026Guilt 172 7025

ShameHappiness 7045 7023Serenity 7027 7020 7031Sadness 175 041Fear 128Anger 7069Disgust 065Contempt 054Shame 154 035Guilt 153 050

GuiltHappiness 7107 7035Serenity 7051Sadness 198 032 051Fear 162 029AngerDisgust 128Contempt 075Shame 178 051Guilt 183 020

633

comparisons for each emotion in the profile for the six negative emotionsituations across the two studies For Study 1 the effect sizes for the urban andthe rural sample were combined To facilitate the reading of the table onlydifferences for which d was at least 020 (ie equivalent to a small effect) areshown In general effect sizes for Study 1 are larger than those for Study 2 Foremotional reactions the expected differences between men and women were ofmedium (gt 050) to large (gt 080) size whereas for self-perceptions the expecteddifferences between men and women were small to medium in size

The most stable sex difference across the two studies was found for sadnessboth as a core emotion in sadness vignettes and as a secondary emotion That isfor all negative emotions the general stereotype describes women as reactingwith more sadness and women also perceive themselves as reacting with moresadness andor report more sadness behaviours Further women are expected toreact with (and they self-report) more shame and guilt reactionsbehaviours inshame and guilt situations However for the other negative emotions (angerdisgust sadness and fear) men report higher levels of shame reactions or shamebehaviours (but not both) Finally fear reactions and behaviours are described asmore likely for women in general and women perceive themselves as reactingwith more fear in disgust sadness fear and guilt situations

Another very stable sex difference across studies regards happiness andserenity reactions for negative emotion vignettes Men consistently are bothexpected to react with and self-report more happiness reactions as well ashappiness behaviours for disgust fear and shame vignettes To a lesser degreethis pattern also emerges for sadness and guilt vignettes As mentioned in thediscussion of Study 1 this may reflect differences in the value structure betweenmen and women

In sum a comparison of effect sizes shows considerable consistency acrossthe two studies Specifically noteworthy is the very consistent finding for boththe stereotypical beliefs and the self-reports with regard to sadness reactionswhich are considered as more likely for women than for men for all negativeemotion situations studied

However a number of differences between the general stereotypes and theself-perceptions also emerged specifically with regard to shame reactionsWhereas women are generally believed to be more likely to react with shameto negative emotion events the self-reported likelihood for shame as aconcomitant emotion is higher for men for all situations except for guilt(given the general confusion regarding these states observed in Westerncultures this may be due to shame being a core rather than a concomitantemotion for guilt scenarios) Yet self-reported shame behaviours are morelikely for women than for men in sadness and disgust situations A possibleexplanation is that men are actively trying to not show shame reactionsmdashtoconform to the general stereotypemdashbut are aware that they nonetheless arelikely to feel shame in those situations

634 HESS ET AL

To conclude the general stereotype and self-perceptions of emotionalreactions and behaviours suggest that women react with more sadness to all typesof negative emotion events Further the stereotypes and the self-perceptions arein agreement on menrsquos greater likelihood to react with happiness and serenity to avariety of negative emotions In contrast differences between the generalstereotypes and self-perceptions emerge for shame reactions with men reportingin situations when shame is a secondary emotion a higher likelihood of shamereactions but not necessarily shame behaviours than do women

STUDY 3

The results from Study 2 suggest that the stereotypical beliefs regarding menrsquosand womenrsquos emotional reactions and behaviours in a variety of emotion-inducing situations converge with self-perceptions of menrsquos and womenrsquosemotional reactions and behaviours in those same situations This finding isconsistent with the notion that autobiographic statements that requireparticipants to summarise over a number of related experiences may be biasedby stereotypical expectations (see eg Feldman-Barrett et al 1998) This leadsto the question of whether a similar overlap can also be found for narratives ofsingle specific emotional events from the participantsrsquo past If stereotypesindeed influence the way emotional events are reconstructed in a narrative wewould expect to find that women report more sadness events and express moresadness overall as well as more intense target emotions for all but anger eventsConversely we would expect men to report more situations involving anger aswell as experiencing more happiness and serenity overall

However as Study 3 is based on personal narratives and not on standardisedvignettes such a finding could simply be due to the fact that the emotionantecedent events in a real-life setting differ for men and women To assess thispossibility we decided to measure the emotion antecedent events by means of anappraisal questionnaire that assesses the participantsrsquo perception of the emotionantecedent situation To the degree that perceptions of emotion antecedents aresimilar for men and women while reported emotional reactions differ we canconclude that observed sex differences are not due to differences in theperception of the event per se For example if womenrsquos tendency to report moresadness were due to a difference in the perception of the emotion antecedentsituation we would expect women to report more often that they did not feel thatthey could do anything to change the situation or that they had to adapt to thesituation (as sadness is generally associated with the notion of irrevocable loss)

Overview

For this study we translated and adapted a questionnaire reported by Scherer(1988) that consists of two parts The first part invites the participants todescribe an event during which they experienced an emotion The second part

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 635

asks specific questions regarding the appraisal process We added a section inwhich we asked participants to complete an emotion profile for the event Toavoid the possibility that men and women would relate narratives from widelydifferent types of situations we asked participants to describe an event related tofamily interactions This class of situations should be readily accessible to allparticipants and ensure that emotional events involving human interactionpartners were reported

Allowing participants to choose the type of emotional events they report hasseveral advantages Most importantly we can assess what type of emotionalevents men and women choose to report spontaneously It also permitsparticipants to choose a salient event for which they can recollect theinformation necessary to respond to the appraisal questions On the other handthis approach is unlikely to result in a well-balanced distribution of emotiontopics thus making it difficult or impossible to analyse the data separately fordifferent emotion themes Yet in the context of the present study we were onlyinterested in sex differences in reports and not in absolute levels of responsesStudies 1 and 2 suggest that sex differences are very stable across all negativeemotions We therefore decided to allow participants to choose the emotiontheme and analysed the data collapsed across all negative emotion themes

Method

Participants A total of 171 students 87 men and 84 women with a meanage of 1862 years participated in this study Most of the participants (147) wererecruited from an ethnically homogenous junior college in the larger Montrealurban area (Cegep Lionel-Groulx Ste-Therese Quebec Canada) and partici-pated in groups An additional 24 participants were recruited individually

Procedure The experimenter explained that the study concerned emotionalevents in peoplersquos lives Participants were informed of their right to discontinueparticipation at any time and for any reason The experimenter then distributedthe questionnaires and responded to questions regarding the procedure The tasktook between 10 and 30 minutes Most of this time difference can be attributedto the amount of detail provided in the event description that ranged from acouple of words (eg birth of my daughter) to well over a page

Dependent measures The questionnaire consisted of four parts The firstpart was an open-ended question asking the participants to describe any eventinvolving their family life that led them to experience an emotion Sadnessshame anger guilt joy fear and disgust were provided as examples ofemotions Participants were asked to give a detailed description of the situationincluding the events that led up to it their reactions and those of others presentIn addition they were asked to identify the people involved with respect to their

636 HESS ET AL

relationship with them (eg my partner my sister etc) as well as to identify themain emotion theme of the story This served to ensure that the participantsbased their answers to the following questions on a specific event and not on aclass of similar events

Emotion description The second part of the questionnaire consisted ofquestions regarding when the event happened for how long they felt theemotion and the intensity of the core emotion identified as the emotion theme ofthe story Participants were also asked to indicate whether they tried to hide orcontrol their feelings and to what degree This part also contained the emotionprofile used in Studies 1 and 2 Using this measure participants were asked toindicate to what percentage they had felt each of the nine emotions from theprofile

Appraisal questionnaire A series of questions regarding the appraisal processwere used to assess the emotion antecedent events These questions weretranslated from the questionnaire reported by Scherer (1988) Specificallyparticipants were asked to what degree they had expected the situation to occurhow pleasant or unpleasant they considered the event whether the event helpedor hindered them in achieving their aims to what degree they considered that thesituation or the event that caused the emotion was unjust or unfair whether theevent was caused by their own or by someone elsersquos behaviour to what degreethey considered that the behaviour that caused the event would be judged asimproper or immoral by their acquaintances how the event affected theirfeelings about themselves such as their self-esteem or self-confidence andfinally to what degree the event changed their relationships with the peopleinvolved (all on negative-positive 7-point bipolar scales)

In addition participants were given a list of 11 specific potential causes of theevent (caused it myself natural causes act of god etc) They also evaluatedtheir ability to act upon or to cope with the event and its consequences using ascale involving 5 options The last part of the questionnaire consisted ofquestions regarding the participantsrsquo sex their age and whether they werecurrently seeing someone in a love-based relationship and if so for how long

Results

Of the 171 reported emotion events 147 (74 reported by men and 73 reported bywomen) concerned negative emotional events Of these a total of 62 weresadness events 22 were anger events and 11 were guilt events The remainingevents were distributed over a large number of negative emotions

As expected the very low frequency of reports for specific emotion themesmade separate analyses of reports of these events unfeasible We thereforedecided to perform analyses on the data summed over all negative emotionthemes The 24 events with positive emotion themes were obviously excludedfrom these analyses

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 637

Do women report more sadness events and men more anger events Toaddress this question a chi-square test was performed on the frequency withwhich men and women labeled the reported event as a sad versus an anger eventIn line with the results of Studies 1 and 2 we found men to report more angerevents and women to report more sadness events Specifically 14 men and 8women reported anger events and 25 men and 37 women reported sad events w2

= 355 p = 06 d = 42Do women report more intense core emotions than men For the intensity of

the core emotion experienced during the event women reported significantlyhigher levels (M = 593 SD = 101) than men (M = 554 SD = 123) t(145) =222 p = 028 d = 37

Do women and men report different levels of negative emotions across theemotion profile Figure 2 presents the emotion profiles separately for men andwomen An inspection of the profiles shows that overall men report morehappinessserenity whereas women report higher levels of all other emotionsThe profiles are nonparallel F(8 137) = 5877 p lt 001 Post-hoc analysesrevealed a significant sex difference in self-reported sadness with womenreporting higher levels than men To compare the sex differences in the profiles

Figure 2 Emotion profile for menrsquos and womenrsquos self-reported emotional reactions to negativeemotion events (Study 3)

638 HESS ET AL

found in this study with those from Studies 1 and 2 effect sizes were calculatedUsing the same cut-off point as previously (small effect size d = 020) only twodifferences were found to be stable across the three studies Men report higherlevels of happiness for negative emotion events (d = 7022) and women reporthigher levels of sadness (d = 043) As the latter difference may be due to thehigher frequency of reported sadness events by women we also verified whetherwomen report higher levels of sadness when sadness events are excluded fromthe analysis An inspection of the means revealed a marginally significantdifference in the same direction M = 6472 SD = 3247 and M = 5108 SD =3684 for women and men respectively t(83) = 181 p = 074 d = 40

Are there differences in appraisal patterns between men and women Asmentioned earlier the reported differences in emotional reactions could be dueto differences in the perception of the emotion antecedent events Yet nodifferences in appraisal patterns were found suggesting that emotion antecedentevents were perceived similarly In addition despite the more frequent and moreintense reports of sadness women did not report different coping styles thanmen and did not seem to feel more helpless (38 men vs 34 women report thisreaction) In fact women more frequently report that they felt able to lsquolsquoinfluencethe situation positivelyrsquorsquo (19 women vs 9 men report this reaction though thedifference is not significant)

Discussion

Study 3 extended the study of emotion stereotypes and self-perceptions based onvignettes to narratives of emotional events that the participants had in factexperienced themselves The goal of the study was to investigate whether thefindings from Studies 1 and 2 generalise to such recollections of personal eventsThe results strongly suggest this to be the case Women again report higherlevels of sadness for negative emotion events They also report more sad eventsin general Men on the other hand report more anger events as well as morehappiness for negative emotion events as was found in both Studies 1 and 2 Yetno reported differences in appraisal or coping emerged This suggests that theobserved differences in emotional reactions are not due to a bias in the appraisalprocess nor to an inability to act upon the event

If emotion antecedents do not differ why are differences in emotionalreactions reported We suggest that such differences represent an influence ofthe general emotion stereotype on the narrative reconstruction of a personalevent This conclusion is based on the observation of a null effect and thus opento the critique that the present study lacked the power necessary to detect realdifferences in appraisal between men and women To assess this critique wecalculated the absolute mean effect size for the interval-scaled appraisalquestions to be d = 015 To achieve 80 power a sample of 1100 participantswould be needed These data underscore the very slim differences in appraisals

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 639

between men and women making it highly unlikely that the effects observed inthis study are mediated by a difference in appraisal and thus by a difference inthe perception of the underlying event

CONCLUSIONS

The present series of studies had the goal to assess general emotion stereotypesand their influence on self-perceptions of emotional reactions by men andwomen We wanted to both describe these stereotypes in more detail with regardnot only to the modal emotion for a specific event (such as sadness reactions to aloss) but also with regard to the secondary emotions present in these situationsFurther we wanted to assess to what degree such expectations for men andwomen in general are endorsed by individuals for themselves as well as whetherthey would be spontaneously reported when relating a personally experiencedevent

Two gender differences were found to be stable across all three experimentalparadigms Women are expected to be more likely to react with sadness in allnegative emotion situations they expect themselves to be more likely to reactwith sadness as well as to cry and to withdraw more and finally women reportmore sadness in personal events In contrast men are expected to react withmore happinessserenity during negative emotional situations they expectthemselves to react more frequently this way as well as to laugh and smile moreand to be more relaxed They also tend to report more happiness whendescribing negative personal events

Not all general emotion stereotypes were found in the self-perceptionsstudied in Studies 2 and 3 Specifically according to Study 1 women areexpected to be more likely to react with shame and guilt in all negative emotionsituations Yet women did not expect to do so for themselves in situations otherthan shame and guilt situations and in fact men reported to be more likely toreact with shame in a variety of situations Further men and women did notreport any differences with regard to experiences of shame and guilt during thepersonal events

Study 3 included an appraisal questionnaire to address the question whetherthe self-reported differences in emotionality between men and women are due todifferences in the appraisal of the emotion antecedent events or rather to theinfluence of the prevalent norms No differences in appraisals were detectedsuggesting that the self-reported differences may be due to the normative forcesof the general stereotype rather than to appraisal differences

It may be argued that the Study 3 is based on recollections of past events andthat self-reports of emotional experiences represent after the fact reconstructionsthat differ from the actually experienced emotions during the event (seeParkinson amp Manstead 1993) A related argument may be made for Study 2where participants had to estimate the likelihood of their emotional reactions to

640 HESS ET AL

hypothetical events (even though the latter were chosen to be common everydayevents) This may well be true Yet the question remains why did men andwomen reconstruct the events differently in terms of their emotional reactionsThe answer would then be that the prevalent emotion stereotype which islargely endorsed by the population studied influenced this reconstruction Yetas peoplesrsquo sense of self depends on their past histories this would imply thatreconstructions of emotional events in line with emotion stereotypes mayeventually lead individuals to conform more closely to these stereotypes as theybecome more and more part of their emotional history and eventually of theiremotional self

Manuscript received 30 May 1997Revised manuscript received 23 February 2000

REFERENCES

Adams S Kuebli J Boyle PA amp Fivush R (1995) Gender differences in parent-childconversations about past emotions A longitudinal investigation Sex Roles 33 309ndash323

Allen JG amp Haccoun DM (1976) Sex differences in emotionality A multidimensional approachHuman Relations 29 711ndash722

Averill JR (1997) The emotions An integrative approach In R Hogan JA Johnson amp SRBriggs (Eds) Handbook of personality psychology (pp 513ndash541) San Diego CA AcademicPress

Birnbaum DW (1983) Preschoolersrsquo stereotypes about sex differences in emotionality Areaffirmation Journal of Genetic Psychology 143 139ndash140

Briton NJ amp Hall JA (1995) Gender-based expectancies and observer judgements of smilingJournal of Nonverbal Behavior 19 49ndash65

Brody LR amp Hall JA (1993) Gender and emotion In M Lewis amp JM Haviland (Eds)Handbook of emotions (pp 447-460) New York Guilford Press

Crawford J Clippax S Onyx J Gault U amp Benton P (1992) Emotion and genderConstructing meaning from memory London Sage

Dunn J Bretherton I amp Munn P (1987) Conversations about feeling states between mothers andtheir children Developmental Psychology 23 132ndash139

Eagly AH amp Mladinic A (1989) Gender stereotypes and attitudes toward women and menPersonality and Social Psychology Bulletin 15 543ndash558

Ekman P amp Friesen W (1986) A new pan-cultural facial expression of emotion Motivation andEmotion 10 159ndash168

Feldman-Barrett L Robin L Pietromonaco PR amp Eysell KM (1998) Are women the moreemotional sex Evidence from emotional experiences in social context Cognition and Emotion12 555ndash578

Fernandez-Dols J-M amp Ruiz-Belda M-A (1995) Are smiles a sign of happiness Gold medalwinners at the Olympic Games Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 69 1113ndash1119

Fischer A (1993) Sex differences in emotionality Fact or stereotype Feminism and Psychology 3303ndash318

Fivush R (1989) Exploring differences in the emotional content of mother child conversationsabout the past Sex Roles 20 675ndash691

Frank MG amp Ekman P (1993) Not all smiles are created equal The differences betweenenjoyment and nonenjoymen t smiles [Special Issue Current issues in psychological humorresearch] Humor International Journal of Humor Research 6 9ndash26

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 641

Gallois C (1994) Group membership social rules and power A social psychologica l perspectiveon emotional communication Journal of Pragmatics 22 301ndash324

Hall JA (1984) Nonverbal sex differences Communication accuracy and expressive styleBaltimore MD Johns Hopkins University Press

Izard C (1972) Patterns of emotions A new analysis of anxiety and depression New YorkAcademic Press

Jussim L Milbourn M amp Nelson W (1991) Emotional openness Sex-role stereotypes and self-perceptions Representative Research in Social Psychology 19 35ndash52

Kirouac G amp Hess U (1999) Group membership and the decoding of nonverbal behavior In PPhilippot R Feldman amp E Coats (Eds) The social context of nonverbal behavior (pp 182ndash210) New York Cambridge University Press

Kring AM amp Gordon AH (1998) Sex differences in emotion Expression experience andphysiology Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74 686ndash703

LaFrance M amp Banaji M (1992) Toward a reconsideration of the gender-emotion relationship InMS Clark (Ed) Emotion and social behavior Review of personality and social psychology(Vol 14 pp 178ndash201) Newbury Park CA Sage

LaFrance M amp Hecht MA (1995) Why smiles generate leniency Personality and SocialPsychology Bulletin 21 207ndash214

Lazarus RS (1991) Emotion and adaptation Oxford UK Oxford University PressParkinson B amp Manstead ASR (1993) Making sense of emotion in stories and social life

Cognition and Emotion 7 295ndash323Plutchik R (1980) Emotion A psychoevolutionar y synthesis New York Harper amp RowRime B Mesquita B Philippot P amp Boca S (1991) Beyond the emotional event Six studies on

the social sharing of emotion Cognition and Emotion 5 435ndash465Scherer KR (1988) Appendix C Questionnaire used in the International Survey on Emotion

Antecedents and Reactions (ISEAR) In KR Scherer (Ed) Facets of emotion Recent researchHillsdale NJ Erlbaum

Sherman JW amp Bessenhoff GR (1999) Stereotypes as source monitoring cues On theinteraction between episodic and semantic memory Psychological Science 10 106ndash110

Stoppard JM amp Gruchy CD (1993) Gender context and expression of positive emotionPersonality and Social Psychology Bulletin 19 143ndash150

Tucker JS amp Riggio RE (1988) The role of social skills in encoding posed and spontaneousfacial expressions Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 12 87ndash97

Wallbott HG amp Scherer KR (1994) Cultural determinants in experiencing shame and guilt InJune Price Tangney amp Kurt W Fischer (Eds) Self conscious emotions The psychology of shameand guilt embarrasment and pride (pp 465ndash487) New York Guilford Press

642 HESS ET AL

stereotypical beliefs may act as a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy and moveself-perceptions in the direction of being consistent with the stereotype Alsoit is possible that widely held cultural beliefs become prescriptive and thuslead individuals to describe their own behaviour as being in accordance withthe stereotype Gallois (1994) in a review of emotion communication ininterpersonal situations concludes that emotion communication in suchsituations is highly rule-governed A similar perspective underlies Averillrsquos(1997) argument regarding the notion of emotion roles that have entrancerequirements such that for example a successful display of anger presupposessufficient power to adequately address the anger eliciting issue AlsoStoppard and Gruchy (1993) found that individuals anticipate costs andrewards for showing certain emotions in certain contexts Specifically womenexpect more costs when not expressing positive emotions in an lsquolsquootherrsquorsquo-oriented context whereas men expect rewards for showing positive emotionsregardless of context

Taken together these findings from diverse domains suggest that self-perceptions of emotional reactions should show a clear overlap withstereotypical expectations within any particular culture To the degree that weassume that these influences are due to recollection biases we may furtherspeculate that the overlap is less pronounced when asking about behaviouralreactions in particular social contexts than when asking for reactions inlsquolsquogeneralrsquorsquo or independent of a specific social situation Specifically as data onactual behaviour suggest relatively few sex differences in emotional behaviourwhereas the stereotype suggests a wide range of such differences differences inself-perceptions are more likely to be due to the influence of the culturalstereotypes than to actual behavioural differences between the genders Study 2is focused on an analysis of this possibility

STUDY 2

Study 1 confirmed that at least in the Quebec culture there are widely sharedbeliefs concerning how men and women differ in their emotion-relevantexpressive behaviour The central issue to be addressed in Study 2 therefore isthe degree of parallelism that exists between perceptions of how typical malesand females are perceived to respond to emotional events (Study 1) and self-perceptions of onersquos own emotional expressivity

To answer this question men and women drawn from the same population asin Study 1 were asked to indicate for each of the seven types of emotionsituations employed in Study 1 to what degree they expected to react themselveswith each of nine emotions if this event should happen to them In addition weasked participants to indicate the likelihood that they would show each of ninetypes of behaviours corresponding to the nine emotions of the emotion profileThese measures were embedded in a larger questionnaire that assessed beliefs

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 623

regarding emotional reactions of other social groups4 This placement made surethat the cultural beliefs and stereotypes held by the participants regardingemotional expressivity in general were evoked However the specific issue ofsex differences was not alluded to

Method

Participants A total of 360 students attending junior colleges in theMontreal urban region participated in the study Of these only thoseparticipants whose first language learned and still spoken was French whowere born in the province of Quebec (Canada) who had not lived outside ofQuebec for more than five consecutive years and who identified themselvesas either Canadian or Quebecois and not as a member of any other groupwere retained5 The resulting sample consisted of 289 individuals In total163 women and 126 men with a mean age of 1886 years participated ingroups of between 15 and 40 participants Of these 63 men and 85 womencompleted the emotion profiles and 63 men and 78 women completed thebehavioural reactions scale

Procedure Participants were informed of their right to discontinueparticipation at any time and for any reason The experimenter then distributedthe questionnaires The instructions as well as an example were provided on thefirst page The same instructions as employed in Study 1 were used the onlydifference being that participants were told to think about how they would reactand to indicate the likelihood in percent that they themselves would react witheach of the emotionsbehaviours indicated The same instructions were given forboth the emotion profile and the behavioural reactions scale with the onlydifference being that for the latter the word lsquolsquoemotionrsquorsquo was replaced withlsquolsquobehaviourrsquorsquo

Materials For each of seven emotions (happiness anger fear sadnessdisgust shame and guilt) two of the four vignettes employed in Study 1 wereretained Each participant responded to only one vignette for each emotion andvignettes were counterbalanced across participants

4 In the present context only data from the part of the questionnaire asking participants about howthey themselves would react in the described situation will be presented

5These selection criteria were included because the participants for Study 2 were recruited fromseveral Montreal junior colleges with an ethnically diverse population Emotion stereotypes are wellknown to differ between cultures (Kirouac amp Hess 1999) and the participants in Study 1 wererecruited from an ethnically homogenous population To ensure comparability between the twosamples it was therefore necessary to exclude participants from groups not present in the firstsample

624 HESS ET AL

Dependent measures

Emotion profiles These were computed in the same manner as in Study 1That is responses were averaged across the vignettes representing each specificemotion theme

Behavioural reactions scale This scale is intended to assess thebehavioural reactions that are expected for someone who is experiencing theemotional state in question To construct the scale a two-step procedure wasemployed

First 68 students of the University of Quebec at Montreal 54 women and 14men with a mean age of 279 years were asked to list for each of nineemotions (happiness serenity anger disgust fear contempt sadness shameand guilt) the behaviours and observable reactions they associate with eachspecific emotion The answers were compiled into frequency lists andsynonyms were grouped together The three most frequently namedbehaviours for each emotion were retained Due to overlap between someemotions this procedure yielded a list of 22 behaviours For the second step atotal of 44 participants 28 women and 16 men with a mean age of 226years were asked to rate for each behaviour and each of the nine emotionsthe likelihood of observing the behaviour in a person experiencing theemotion using a 7-point scale (1 very unlikely 7 very likely) Behavioursthat received a mean rating of 6 or above for only one emotion comprise thefinal scale

These consisted of the following items6 to laughto get excited (happiness)to trembleto freeze (fear) to hitto insultto criticise (anger) to cryto isolateoneself (sadness) to grimaceto vomit (disgust) to stareto look hard at(contempt) to smileto relaxto contemplate (serenity) to withdrawto loweronersquos headto blush (shame) to justify oneselfto apologise (guilt) On theprofile measure participants were asked to indicate the likelihood as apercentage that they would show each of the behaviours in a situation like theone described in the vignettes

Data analyses Each participant responded to one scenario for each of theseven emotions themes and used only one type of scale As in Study 1 thedata were collapsed over scenarios Because we had responses from morewomen than men for both dependent measures the data for the femaleparticipants were weighted to create equal cell sizes Profile analyses acrossthe nine emotional reactionsbehaviours were conducted to assess sexdifferences

6These items were translated from the original French by the authors

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 625

Results and discussion

As noted earlier the goal of Study 2 was to assess to what degree the self-perceptions of the men and women who participated in this study overlap withthe general stereotypes found in Study 1 To accomplish this the emotionprofiles from Study 1 were compared with the self-reported emotional profilesand with the behavioural reaction profiles collected here

Self-described emotion profiles The means and standard deviations for thenine scales of the emotion profiles for male and female participants arepresented in Table 3 A comparison of these means with those of the profilesfrom Study 1 reveals substantial similarities between the emotional reactionsexpected for oneself and those expected for men and women in general

Behavioral reactions Table 3 shows the means and standard deviations forthe nine behavioural reaction profiles These profiles represent the participantsself-report of the likelihood that they would display these specific behaviours inthe situations described by the vignettes As the focus of this paper is on sex

TABLE 3Means and standard deviations for self-perceptions of emotional reactionsbehaviours

for men and women (Study 2)

Men Women

Situation Mean SD Mean SD

AngerHappiness 262 1224 006 054Laughget excited 790 1826 429 1168Serenity 262 827 135 532Smilerelaxcontemplate 865 2068 435 1185Sadness 2359 2390 4405 3151Cryisolate oneself 935 2083 1825 2250Fear 603 1589 486 1070Tremblefreeze 332 814 630 1155Anger 6268 2873 6076 2928Hitinsultcriticise 3540 3042 2654 2873Disgust 1175 2447 1094 1997Grimacevomit 194 553 286 854Contempt 1865 2505 2102 2543Starelook hard at 2065 2718 1156 2216Shame 286 827 802 1887Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 1044 2187 1038 1642Guilt 349 826 491 1582Justify oneselfapologise 2045 3072 1761 2663

(Continued)

626 HESS ET AL

TABLE 3(Continued)

Men Women

Situation Mean SD Mean SD

DisgustHappiness 611 1714 143 575Laughget excited 1989 2669 915 1825Serenity 611 1855 208 1159Smilerelaxcontemplate 1159t 2113 578 1482Sadness 516 1537 490 1531Cryisolate oneself 073 403 346 1352Fear 373t 1066 911 2018Tremblefreeze 476t 1154 1015 1977Anger 1359 2146 1437 2521Hitinsultcriticise 1214 2210 1186 2151Disgust 5086 3257 5881 3178Grimacevomit 1167 2121 1692 2236Contempt 1798 2226 1750 2706Starelook hard at 1991 2362 1686 2363Shame 1023 1972 1683 2738Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 645 1663 1169 2337Guilt 262 937 119 378Justify oneselfapologise 992 2511 744 1924

SadnessHappiness 317 1280 412 1594Laughget excited 123 789 128 114Serenity 887t 2017 318 1456Smilerelaxcontemplate 621 1848 346 1196Sadness 7690 2816 8251 2258Cryisolate oneself 6008 3131 6736 3059Fear 849t 1820 1546 2637Tremblefreeze 1595 2763 1135 2068Anger 1825 2641 2261 2919Hitinsultcriticise 532 1399 641 1517Disgust 651t 2015 176 940Grimacevomit 790 2017 353 1318Contempt 659 2125 332 1121Starelook hard at 000 000 045 397Shame 214 1050 141 711Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 2008 2916 724 1680Guilt 1524 2494 2141 2985Justify oneselfapologise 315 1065 391 1478

FearHappiness 317 1487 006 054Laughget excited 203 1054 058 361Serenity 587 1698 082 327

(Continued overleaf)

627

TABLE 3(Continued)

Men Women

Situation Mean SD Mean SD

Smilerelaxcontemplate 1048 2243 182 666Sadness 2333 3051 2929 3588Cryisolate oneself 1306 2536 3022 3582Fear 5111 3207 7535 2715Tremblefreeze 2008 2565 3378 3378Anger 2468 3297 1954 2949Hitinsultcriticise 1222 2098 446 1410Disgust 787 1808 1006 2206Grimacevomit 429 1270 365 1115Contempt 1192 2216 1141 2078Starelook hard at 677 1822 391 1405Shame 143 470 200 615Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 1606 2579 1000 2117Guilt 794 2199 369 995Justify oneselfapologise 282 1263 276 1319

ShameHappiness 452 1596 144 1039Laughget excited 1825 2905 1387 1990Serenity 444 1492 182 1028Smilerelaxcontemplate 1206t 2333 623 1262Sadness 1151 2121 2077 2361Cryisolate oneself 334 877 426 1107Fear 1246 2431 1135 1700Tremblefreeze 776 1569 894 1491Anger 1262 2259 1432 2408Hitinsultcriticise 565 1478 314 1140Disgust 206 966 347 1244Grimacevomit 202 590 231 1086Contempt 730 1532 811 1880Starelook hard at 347 833 304 1160Shame 4819 3534 5968 2948Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 2563 2974 2885 2908Guilt 3095 3442 4788 3282Justify oneselfapologise 4379 3144 4256 3074

GuiltHappiness 1024 2432 355 1189Laughget excited 734 2259 584 1761Serenity 262 1008 223 771Smilerelaxcontemplate 645 1692 416 1409Sadness 2003t 2705 2971 3390Cryisolate oneself 960 1992 2273 2979Fear 1778 2667 2653 3305

(Continued)

628

differences we will not discuss these data in detail However two things arenoteworthy First both men and women report lower probabilities that theywould react with a certain behaviour for example lsquolsquoto laughto get excitedrsquorsquothan with the emotion that corresponds to the behaviour (happiness) Thisfinding is not unexpected as individuals do not always express their emotionsoutwardly or may have developed idiosyncratic means of expressing certainemotions Second the profile data for the behaviours resemble strongly theemotional reactions reported For example for anger the highest means arefound for to hitto insultto criticise for to cryto isolate one self and for to stare

TABLE 3(Continued)

Men Women

Situation Mean SD Mean SD

Tremblefreeze 1206 2212 1227 2024Anger 1762 2980 1926 2950Hitinsultcriticise 129 543 221 720Disgust 1248 2569 1152 2402Grimacevomit 581 1642 351 1385Contempt 1603 2857 1464 2611Starelook hard at 129 495 136 485Shame 2667 3227 5375 3467Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 1952 2472 1769 2333Guilt 5071 3885 5753 3372Justify oneselfapologise 4484 3581 4286 3608

HappinessHappiness 8913 1981 9106 1471Laughget excited 5763 3420 6069 3283Serenity 2738t 3650 3906 3797Smilerelaxcontemplate 5451 3445 4647 3432Sadness 127 946 020 123Cryisolate oneself 040 318 029 141Fear 103 372 206 680Tremblefreeze 419t 1313 090 057Anger 032 252 000 000Hitinsultcriticise 000 000 013 114Disgust 048 378 000 000Grimacevomit 000 000 000 000Contempt 081 522 000 000Starelook hard at 355 1392 147 388Shame 111 764 000 000Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 718 1905 687 1859Guilt 270 1526 000 000Justify oneselfapologise 355 1535 090 340

Note Significant differences between men and women tp lt 1 p lt 05 p lt 01 p lt 001

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 629

to look hard at which correspond to anger sadness and contempt reactionsrespectively

However a number of differences between these two types of profiles canalso be observed For example for the emotional reaction profiles for anger andsadness the second highest mean is found for guilt whereas for the behaviouralreaction profiles for these emotions the second highest mean is found for shamebehaviours (to withdrawto lower onersquos headto blush) This findings may be dueto the general confusion between shame and guilt that has been observed forWestern cultures (see eg Wallbott amp Scherer 1994)

Sex differences To assess whether male and female participants differedwith regard to their expected emotional reactions and behaviours in the differentemotion eliciting situations profile analyses were conducted on the ratings foreach emotion situation All analyses and post-hoc tests were conducted at analpha level of 05 The results are shown in Table 4

TABLE 4Results of profile analyses on self-reported likelihood

of emotional reactionsbehaviours for men andwomen (Study 2)

Vignettes F df p

AngerReactions 295 8116 005Behaviours 183 8113 079

DisgustReactions 169 8115 107Behaviours 173 8116 099

FearReactions 330 8116 002Behaviours 390 8116 001

SadnessReactions 207 8116 044Behaviours 170 8115 105

GuiltReactions 186 8117 071Behaviours 130 8115 251

ShameReactions 215 8116 037Behaviours 70 8116 689

HappinessReactions 106 8116 397Behaviours 109 8116 376

630 HESS ET AL

Emotional reactions For all emotion situations except disgust andhappiness the emotional reactions profiles were nonparallel or marginallynonparallel (see Table 4) For the nonparallel profiles post-hoc tests revealedthat a similar pattern of sex differences emerged across the different emotionthemes For happiness and serenity there were either no significant differencesbetween men and women or men reported experiencing these emotions with ahigher probability than did women Conversely for sadness fear shame andguilt there were either no significant sex differences or women reported feelingthese emotions with a higher probability than did men For anger disgust andcontempt reactions no significant differences emerged

Emotional behaviour profiles Only the fear profile was significantlynonparallel (different) for men and women The profiles for anger and disgustwere marginally nonparallel and the remaining profiles were all parallel andcoincident Thus fewer significant differences between menrsquos and womenrsquosexpected behaviours in the situations described by the vignettes were found thanwas the case for the expected emotional reactions in Studies 1 and 2 Yet it isimportant to note that the probabilities reported for the behavioural profiles werelower overall and it is thus possible that this lack of differences is due to a lackof sensitivity of the measure

As postulated based on previous research (eg Crawford Clippax OnyxGault amp Benton 1992) as well as on the emotional reactions profile womenreport a higher probability of either crying or isolating oneself in an angersituation than do men Conversely and in accordance with both the literature onanger expression (see earlier) and the results from the emotional reactionsprofile men report it more likely to hitto insultto criticise than women thoughthis difference is not significant In addition they report that they aresignificantly more likely to stareto look hard (contempt) than do women abehaviour that could also be interpreted as aggressive when shown in responseto an insult

As regards the disgust situations men report that they are more likely tolaughto get excited This sex difference matches the finding for the emotionalreactions profile but was not found in Study 1 Finally for the fear situation menreport that they are more likely to hitto insultto criticise as well as to smiletorelaxto contemplate (serenity) than do women The emotional reactions profilefor fear from this study shows that men report a higher probability of reactingwith serenity but not with anger than do women As these behaviourscorrespond to a macho or cool demeanour in a threatening situation they fit thegeneral stereotype of masculine behaviour Conversely women report to bemore likely to trembleto freeze as well as to cryto isolate one self in fearsituations

In sum although many fewer sex differences reached significance whencomparing self-reported expected behaviours for men and women the pattern of

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 631

results is largely congruent with previous findings Specifically women reporteda higher probability of showing behaviours congruent with sadness and fear thandid men whereas men reported higher probabilities for anger and serenebehaviours In addition men reported a higher probability of showing acontempt behaviour in an anger situation yet the relevant behaviour (to staretolook hard) could be interpreted as aggressive in that context

How congruent are the findings fromStudies 1 and 2

As mentioned earlier not all significant differences found in Study 1 for theexpected reactions for men and women in general were also found for self-reports of expected reactions by men and women for themselves Yet as theresults for the two studies are based on different degrees of freedomsignificance levels cannot be directly compared To assess whether stereotypicaland self-reported sex differences were of similar magnitude we computed theeffect sizes for both studies Table 5 shows Cohenrsquos d for the post-hoc

TABLE 5Cohenrsquos d for sex differences in Studies 1 and 2

Study 1 Study 2

SituationEmotionalreactions

Emotionalreactions

Emotionalbehaviours

AngerHappiness 7023Serenity 7025Sadness 203 073 041Fear 123 030Anger 7055 7030Disgust 068Contempt 7026Shame 117 7035Guilt 129

DisgustHappiness 7032 7037 7047Serenity 7045 7026 7021Sadness 095 027Fear 189 033 033AngerDisgust 160 024 024Contempt 050Shame 062 7028 026Guilt 062 020

(Continued)

632 HESS ET AL

TABLE 5(Continued)

Study 1 Study 2

SituationEmotionalreactions

Emotionalreactions

Emotionalbehaviours

SadnessHappiness 7053Serenity 7032Sadness 184 022 024Fear 171 031Anger 7065 042Disgust 7030 7025Contempt 021Shame 020 7046 054Guilt 176 022 7033

FearHappiness 7021 7030Serenity 7026 7041 7052Sadness 189 055Fear 221 082 046Anger 7084 7043Disgust 067ContemptShame 049 7026Guilt 172 7025

ShameHappiness 7045 7023Serenity 7027 7020 7031Sadness 175 041Fear 128Anger 7069Disgust 065Contempt 054Shame 154 035Guilt 153 050

GuiltHappiness 7107 7035Serenity 7051Sadness 198 032 051Fear 162 029AngerDisgust 128Contempt 075Shame 178 051Guilt 183 020

633

comparisons for each emotion in the profile for the six negative emotionsituations across the two studies For Study 1 the effect sizes for the urban andthe rural sample were combined To facilitate the reading of the table onlydifferences for which d was at least 020 (ie equivalent to a small effect) areshown In general effect sizes for Study 1 are larger than those for Study 2 Foremotional reactions the expected differences between men and women were ofmedium (gt 050) to large (gt 080) size whereas for self-perceptions the expecteddifferences between men and women were small to medium in size

The most stable sex difference across the two studies was found for sadnessboth as a core emotion in sadness vignettes and as a secondary emotion That isfor all negative emotions the general stereotype describes women as reactingwith more sadness and women also perceive themselves as reacting with moresadness andor report more sadness behaviours Further women are expected toreact with (and they self-report) more shame and guilt reactionsbehaviours inshame and guilt situations However for the other negative emotions (angerdisgust sadness and fear) men report higher levels of shame reactions or shamebehaviours (but not both) Finally fear reactions and behaviours are described asmore likely for women in general and women perceive themselves as reactingwith more fear in disgust sadness fear and guilt situations

Another very stable sex difference across studies regards happiness andserenity reactions for negative emotion vignettes Men consistently are bothexpected to react with and self-report more happiness reactions as well ashappiness behaviours for disgust fear and shame vignettes To a lesser degreethis pattern also emerges for sadness and guilt vignettes As mentioned in thediscussion of Study 1 this may reflect differences in the value structure betweenmen and women

In sum a comparison of effect sizes shows considerable consistency acrossthe two studies Specifically noteworthy is the very consistent finding for boththe stereotypical beliefs and the self-reports with regard to sadness reactionswhich are considered as more likely for women than for men for all negativeemotion situations studied

However a number of differences between the general stereotypes and theself-perceptions also emerged specifically with regard to shame reactionsWhereas women are generally believed to be more likely to react with shameto negative emotion events the self-reported likelihood for shame as aconcomitant emotion is higher for men for all situations except for guilt(given the general confusion regarding these states observed in Westerncultures this may be due to shame being a core rather than a concomitantemotion for guilt scenarios) Yet self-reported shame behaviours are morelikely for women than for men in sadness and disgust situations A possibleexplanation is that men are actively trying to not show shame reactionsmdashtoconform to the general stereotypemdashbut are aware that they nonetheless arelikely to feel shame in those situations

634 HESS ET AL

To conclude the general stereotype and self-perceptions of emotionalreactions and behaviours suggest that women react with more sadness to all typesof negative emotion events Further the stereotypes and the self-perceptions arein agreement on menrsquos greater likelihood to react with happiness and serenity to avariety of negative emotions In contrast differences between the generalstereotypes and self-perceptions emerge for shame reactions with men reportingin situations when shame is a secondary emotion a higher likelihood of shamereactions but not necessarily shame behaviours than do women

STUDY 3

The results from Study 2 suggest that the stereotypical beliefs regarding menrsquosand womenrsquos emotional reactions and behaviours in a variety of emotion-inducing situations converge with self-perceptions of menrsquos and womenrsquosemotional reactions and behaviours in those same situations This finding isconsistent with the notion that autobiographic statements that requireparticipants to summarise over a number of related experiences may be biasedby stereotypical expectations (see eg Feldman-Barrett et al 1998) This leadsto the question of whether a similar overlap can also be found for narratives ofsingle specific emotional events from the participantsrsquo past If stereotypesindeed influence the way emotional events are reconstructed in a narrative wewould expect to find that women report more sadness events and express moresadness overall as well as more intense target emotions for all but anger eventsConversely we would expect men to report more situations involving anger aswell as experiencing more happiness and serenity overall

However as Study 3 is based on personal narratives and not on standardisedvignettes such a finding could simply be due to the fact that the emotionantecedent events in a real-life setting differ for men and women To assess thispossibility we decided to measure the emotion antecedent events by means of anappraisal questionnaire that assesses the participantsrsquo perception of the emotionantecedent situation To the degree that perceptions of emotion antecedents aresimilar for men and women while reported emotional reactions differ we canconclude that observed sex differences are not due to differences in theperception of the event per se For example if womenrsquos tendency to report moresadness were due to a difference in the perception of the emotion antecedentsituation we would expect women to report more often that they did not feel thatthey could do anything to change the situation or that they had to adapt to thesituation (as sadness is generally associated with the notion of irrevocable loss)

Overview

For this study we translated and adapted a questionnaire reported by Scherer(1988) that consists of two parts The first part invites the participants todescribe an event during which they experienced an emotion The second part

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 635

asks specific questions regarding the appraisal process We added a section inwhich we asked participants to complete an emotion profile for the event Toavoid the possibility that men and women would relate narratives from widelydifferent types of situations we asked participants to describe an event related tofamily interactions This class of situations should be readily accessible to allparticipants and ensure that emotional events involving human interactionpartners were reported

Allowing participants to choose the type of emotional events they report hasseveral advantages Most importantly we can assess what type of emotionalevents men and women choose to report spontaneously It also permitsparticipants to choose a salient event for which they can recollect theinformation necessary to respond to the appraisal questions On the other handthis approach is unlikely to result in a well-balanced distribution of emotiontopics thus making it difficult or impossible to analyse the data separately fordifferent emotion themes Yet in the context of the present study we were onlyinterested in sex differences in reports and not in absolute levels of responsesStudies 1 and 2 suggest that sex differences are very stable across all negativeemotions We therefore decided to allow participants to choose the emotiontheme and analysed the data collapsed across all negative emotion themes

Method

Participants A total of 171 students 87 men and 84 women with a meanage of 1862 years participated in this study Most of the participants (147) wererecruited from an ethnically homogenous junior college in the larger Montrealurban area (Cegep Lionel-Groulx Ste-Therese Quebec Canada) and partici-pated in groups An additional 24 participants were recruited individually

Procedure The experimenter explained that the study concerned emotionalevents in peoplersquos lives Participants were informed of their right to discontinueparticipation at any time and for any reason The experimenter then distributedthe questionnaires and responded to questions regarding the procedure The tasktook between 10 and 30 minutes Most of this time difference can be attributedto the amount of detail provided in the event description that ranged from acouple of words (eg birth of my daughter) to well over a page

Dependent measures The questionnaire consisted of four parts The firstpart was an open-ended question asking the participants to describe any eventinvolving their family life that led them to experience an emotion Sadnessshame anger guilt joy fear and disgust were provided as examples ofemotions Participants were asked to give a detailed description of the situationincluding the events that led up to it their reactions and those of others presentIn addition they were asked to identify the people involved with respect to their

636 HESS ET AL

relationship with them (eg my partner my sister etc) as well as to identify themain emotion theme of the story This served to ensure that the participantsbased their answers to the following questions on a specific event and not on aclass of similar events

Emotion description The second part of the questionnaire consisted ofquestions regarding when the event happened for how long they felt theemotion and the intensity of the core emotion identified as the emotion theme ofthe story Participants were also asked to indicate whether they tried to hide orcontrol their feelings and to what degree This part also contained the emotionprofile used in Studies 1 and 2 Using this measure participants were asked toindicate to what percentage they had felt each of the nine emotions from theprofile

Appraisal questionnaire A series of questions regarding the appraisal processwere used to assess the emotion antecedent events These questions weretranslated from the questionnaire reported by Scherer (1988) Specificallyparticipants were asked to what degree they had expected the situation to occurhow pleasant or unpleasant they considered the event whether the event helpedor hindered them in achieving their aims to what degree they considered that thesituation or the event that caused the emotion was unjust or unfair whether theevent was caused by their own or by someone elsersquos behaviour to what degreethey considered that the behaviour that caused the event would be judged asimproper or immoral by their acquaintances how the event affected theirfeelings about themselves such as their self-esteem or self-confidence andfinally to what degree the event changed their relationships with the peopleinvolved (all on negative-positive 7-point bipolar scales)

In addition participants were given a list of 11 specific potential causes of theevent (caused it myself natural causes act of god etc) They also evaluatedtheir ability to act upon or to cope with the event and its consequences using ascale involving 5 options The last part of the questionnaire consisted ofquestions regarding the participantsrsquo sex their age and whether they werecurrently seeing someone in a love-based relationship and if so for how long

Results

Of the 171 reported emotion events 147 (74 reported by men and 73 reported bywomen) concerned negative emotional events Of these a total of 62 weresadness events 22 were anger events and 11 were guilt events The remainingevents were distributed over a large number of negative emotions

As expected the very low frequency of reports for specific emotion themesmade separate analyses of reports of these events unfeasible We thereforedecided to perform analyses on the data summed over all negative emotionthemes The 24 events with positive emotion themes were obviously excludedfrom these analyses

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 637

Do women report more sadness events and men more anger events Toaddress this question a chi-square test was performed on the frequency withwhich men and women labeled the reported event as a sad versus an anger eventIn line with the results of Studies 1 and 2 we found men to report more angerevents and women to report more sadness events Specifically 14 men and 8women reported anger events and 25 men and 37 women reported sad events w2

= 355 p = 06 d = 42Do women report more intense core emotions than men For the intensity of

the core emotion experienced during the event women reported significantlyhigher levels (M = 593 SD = 101) than men (M = 554 SD = 123) t(145) =222 p = 028 d = 37

Do women and men report different levels of negative emotions across theemotion profile Figure 2 presents the emotion profiles separately for men andwomen An inspection of the profiles shows that overall men report morehappinessserenity whereas women report higher levels of all other emotionsThe profiles are nonparallel F(8 137) = 5877 p lt 001 Post-hoc analysesrevealed a significant sex difference in self-reported sadness with womenreporting higher levels than men To compare the sex differences in the profiles

Figure 2 Emotion profile for menrsquos and womenrsquos self-reported emotional reactions to negativeemotion events (Study 3)

638 HESS ET AL

found in this study with those from Studies 1 and 2 effect sizes were calculatedUsing the same cut-off point as previously (small effect size d = 020) only twodifferences were found to be stable across the three studies Men report higherlevels of happiness for negative emotion events (d = 7022) and women reporthigher levels of sadness (d = 043) As the latter difference may be due to thehigher frequency of reported sadness events by women we also verified whetherwomen report higher levels of sadness when sadness events are excluded fromthe analysis An inspection of the means revealed a marginally significantdifference in the same direction M = 6472 SD = 3247 and M = 5108 SD =3684 for women and men respectively t(83) = 181 p = 074 d = 40

Are there differences in appraisal patterns between men and women Asmentioned earlier the reported differences in emotional reactions could be dueto differences in the perception of the emotion antecedent events Yet nodifferences in appraisal patterns were found suggesting that emotion antecedentevents were perceived similarly In addition despite the more frequent and moreintense reports of sadness women did not report different coping styles thanmen and did not seem to feel more helpless (38 men vs 34 women report thisreaction) In fact women more frequently report that they felt able to lsquolsquoinfluencethe situation positivelyrsquorsquo (19 women vs 9 men report this reaction though thedifference is not significant)

Discussion

Study 3 extended the study of emotion stereotypes and self-perceptions based onvignettes to narratives of emotional events that the participants had in factexperienced themselves The goal of the study was to investigate whether thefindings from Studies 1 and 2 generalise to such recollections of personal eventsThe results strongly suggest this to be the case Women again report higherlevels of sadness for negative emotion events They also report more sad eventsin general Men on the other hand report more anger events as well as morehappiness for negative emotion events as was found in both Studies 1 and 2 Yetno reported differences in appraisal or coping emerged This suggests that theobserved differences in emotional reactions are not due to a bias in the appraisalprocess nor to an inability to act upon the event

If emotion antecedents do not differ why are differences in emotionalreactions reported We suggest that such differences represent an influence ofthe general emotion stereotype on the narrative reconstruction of a personalevent This conclusion is based on the observation of a null effect and thus opento the critique that the present study lacked the power necessary to detect realdifferences in appraisal between men and women To assess this critique wecalculated the absolute mean effect size for the interval-scaled appraisalquestions to be d = 015 To achieve 80 power a sample of 1100 participantswould be needed These data underscore the very slim differences in appraisals

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 639

between men and women making it highly unlikely that the effects observed inthis study are mediated by a difference in appraisal and thus by a difference inthe perception of the underlying event

CONCLUSIONS

The present series of studies had the goal to assess general emotion stereotypesand their influence on self-perceptions of emotional reactions by men andwomen We wanted to both describe these stereotypes in more detail with regardnot only to the modal emotion for a specific event (such as sadness reactions to aloss) but also with regard to the secondary emotions present in these situationsFurther we wanted to assess to what degree such expectations for men andwomen in general are endorsed by individuals for themselves as well as whetherthey would be spontaneously reported when relating a personally experiencedevent

Two gender differences were found to be stable across all three experimentalparadigms Women are expected to be more likely to react with sadness in allnegative emotion situations they expect themselves to be more likely to reactwith sadness as well as to cry and to withdraw more and finally women reportmore sadness in personal events In contrast men are expected to react withmore happinessserenity during negative emotional situations they expectthemselves to react more frequently this way as well as to laugh and smile moreand to be more relaxed They also tend to report more happiness whendescribing negative personal events

Not all general emotion stereotypes were found in the self-perceptionsstudied in Studies 2 and 3 Specifically according to Study 1 women areexpected to be more likely to react with shame and guilt in all negative emotionsituations Yet women did not expect to do so for themselves in situations otherthan shame and guilt situations and in fact men reported to be more likely toreact with shame in a variety of situations Further men and women did notreport any differences with regard to experiences of shame and guilt during thepersonal events

Study 3 included an appraisal questionnaire to address the question whetherthe self-reported differences in emotionality between men and women are due todifferences in the appraisal of the emotion antecedent events or rather to theinfluence of the prevalent norms No differences in appraisals were detectedsuggesting that the self-reported differences may be due to the normative forcesof the general stereotype rather than to appraisal differences

It may be argued that the Study 3 is based on recollections of past events andthat self-reports of emotional experiences represent after the fact reconstructionsthat differ from the actually experienced emotions during the event (seeParkinson amp Manstead 1993) A related argument may be made for Study 2where participants had to estimate the likelihood of their emotional reactions to

640 HESS ET AL

hypothetical events (even though the latter were chosen to be common everydayevents) This may well be true Yet the question remains why did men andwomen reconstruct the events differently in terms of their emotional reactionsThe answer would then be that the prevalent emotion stereotype which islargely endorsed by the population studied influenced this reconstruction Yetas peoplesrsquo sense of self depends on their past histories this would imply thatreconstructions of emotional events in line with emotion stereotypes mayeventually lead individuals to conform more closely to these stereotypes as theybecome more and more part of their emotional history and eventually of theiremotional self

Manuscript received 30 May 1997Revised manuscript received 23 February 2000

REFERENCES

Adams S Kuebli J Boyle PA amp Fivush R (1995) Gender differences in parent-childconversations about past emotions A longitudinal investigation Sex Roles 33 309ndash323

Allen JG amp Haccoun DM (1976) Sex differences in emotionality A multidimensional approachHuman Relations 29 711ndash722

Averill JR (1997) The emotions An integrative approach In R Hogan JA Johnson amp SRBriggs (Eds) Handbook of personality psychology (pp 513ndash541) San Diego CA AcademicPress

Birnbaum DW (1983) Preschoolersrsquo stereotypes about sex differences in emotionality Areaffirmation Journal of Genetic Psychology 143 139ndash140

Briton NJ amp Hall JA (1995) Gender-based expectancies and observer judgements of smilingJournal of Nonverbal Behavior 19 49ndash65

Brody LR amp Hall JA (1993) Gender and emotion In M Lewis amp JM Haviland (Eds)Handbook of emotions (pp 447-460) New York Guilford Press

Crawford J Clippax S Onyx J Gault U amp Benton P (1992) Emotion and genderConstructing meaning from memory London Sage

Dunn J Bretherton I amp Munn P (1987) Conversations about feeling states between mothers andtheir children Developmental Psychology 23 132ndash139

Eagly AH amp Mladinic A (1989) Gender stereotypes and attitudes toward women and menPersonality and Social Psychology Bulletin 15 543ndash558

Ekman P amp Friesen W (1986) A new pan-cultural facial expression of emotion Motivation andEmotion 10 159ndash168

Feldman-Barrett L Robin L Pietromonaco PR amp Eysell KM (1998) Are women the moreemotional sex Evidence from emotional experiences in social context Cognition and Emotion12 555ndash578

Fernandez-Dols J-M amp Ruiz-Belda M-A (1995) Are smiles a sign of happiness Gold medalwinners at the Olympic Games Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 69 1113ndash1119

Fischer A (1993) Sex differences in emotionality Fact or stereotype Feminism and Psychology 3303ndash318

Fivush R (1989) Exploring differences in the emotional content of mother child conversationsabout the past Sex Roles 20 675ndash691

Frank MG amp Ekman P (1993) Not all smiles are created equal The differences betweenenjoyment and nonenjoymen t smiles [Special Issue Current issues in psychological humorresearch] Humor International Journal of Humor Research 6 9ndash26

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 641

Gallois C (1994) Group membership social rules and power A social psychologica l perspectiveon emotional communication Journal of Pragmatics 22 301ndash324

Hall JA (1984) Nonverbal sex differences Communication accuracy and expressive styleBaltimore MD Johns Hopkins University Press

Izard C (1972) Patterns of emotions A new analysis of anxiety and depression New YorkAcademic Press

Jussim L Milbourn M amp Nelson W (1991) Emotional openness Sex-role stereotypes and self-perceptions Representative Research in Social Psychology 19 35ndash52

Kirouac G amp Hess U (1999) Group membership and the decoding of nonverbal behavior In PPhilippot R Feldman amp E Coats (Eds) The social context of nonverbal behavior (pp 182ndash210) New York Cambridge University Press

Kring AM amp Gordon AH (1998) Sex differences in emotion Expression experience andphysiology Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74 686ndash703

LaFrance M amp Banaji M (1992) Toward a reconsideration of the gender-emotion relationship InMS Clark (Ed) Emotion and social behavior Review of personality and social psychology(Vol 14 pp 178ndash201) Newbury Park CA Sage

LaFrance M amp Hecht MA (1995) Why smiles generate leniency Personality and SocialPsychology Bulletin 21 207ndash214

Lazarus RS (1991) Emotion and adaptation Oxford UK Oxford University PressParkinson B amp Manstead ASR (1993) Making sense of emotion in stories and social life

Cognition and Emotion 7 295ndash323Plutchik R (1980) Emotion A psychoevolutionar y synthesis New York Harper amp RowRime B Mesquita B Philippot P amp Boca S (1991) Beyond the emotional event Six studies on

the social sharing of emotion Cognition and Emotion 5 435ndash465Scherer KR (1988) Appendix C Questionnaire used in the International Survey on Emotion

Antecedents and Reactions (ISEAR) In KR Scherer (Ed) Facets of emotion Recent researchHillsdale NJ Erlbaum

Sherman JW amp Bessenhoff GR (1999) Stereotypes as source monitoring cues On theinteraction between episodic and semantic memory Psychological Science 10 106ndash110

Stoppard JM amp Gruchy CD (1993) Gender context and expression of positive emotionPersonality and Social Psychology Bulletin 19 143ndash150

Tucker JS amp Riggio RE (1988) The role of social skills in encoding posed and spontaneousfacial expressions Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 12 87ndash97

Wallbott HG amp Scherer KR (1994) Cultural determinants in experiencing shame and guilt InJune Price Tangney amp Kurt W Fischer (Eds) Self conscious emotions The psychology of shameand guilt embarrasment and pride (pp 465ndash487) New York Guilford Press

642 HESS ET AL

regarding emotional reactions of other social groups4 This placement made surethat the cultural beliefs and stereotypes held by the participants regardingemotional expressivity in general were evoked However the specific issue ofsex differences was not alluded to

Method

Participants A total of 360 students attending junior colleges in theMontreal urban region participated in the study Of these only thoseparticipants whose first language learned and still spoken was French whowere born in the province of Quebec (Canada) who had not lived outside ofQuebec for more than five consecutive years and who identified themselvesas either Canadian or Quebecois and not as a member of any other groupwere retained5 The resulting sample consisted of 289 individuals In total163 women and 126 men with a mean age of 1886 years participated ingroups of between 15 and 40 participants Of these 63 men and 85 womencompleted the emotion profiles and 63 men and 78 women completed thebehavioural reactions scale

Procedure Participants were informed of their right to discontinueparticipation at any time and for any reason The experimenter then distributedthe questionnaires The instructions as well as an example were provided on thefirst page The same instructions as employed in Study 1 were used the onlydifference being that participants were told to think about how they would reactand to indicate the likelihood in percent that they themselves would react witheach of the emotionsbehaviours indicated The same instructions were given forboth the emotion profile and the behavioural reactions scale with the onlydifference being that for the latter the word lsquolsquoemotionrsquorsquo was replaced withlsquolsquobehaviourrsquorsquo

Materials For each of seven emotions (happiness anger fear sadnessdisgust shame and guilt) two of the four vignettes employed in Study 1 wereretained Each participant responded to only one vignette for each emotion andvignettes were counterbalanced across participants

4 In the present context only data from the part of the questionnaire asking participants about howthey themselves would react in the described situation will be presented

5These selection criteria were included because the participants for Study 2 were recruited fromseveral Montreal junior colleges with an ethnically diverse population Emotion stereotypes are wellknown to differ between cultures (Kirouac amp Hess 1999) and the participants in Study 1 wererecruited from an ethnically homogenous population To ensure comparability between the twosamples it was therefore necessary to exclude participants from groups not present in the firstsample

624 HESS ET AL

Dependent measures

Emotion profiles These were computed in the same manner as in Study 1That is responses were averaged across the vignettes representing each specificemotion theme

Behavioural reactions scale This scale is intended to assess thebehavioural reactions that are expected for someone who is experiencing theemotional state in question To construct the scale a two-step procedure wasemployed

First 68 students of the University of Quebec at Montreal 54 women and 14men with a mean age of 279 years were asked to list for each of nineemotions (happiness serenity anger disgust fear contempt sadness shameand guilt) the behaviours and observable reactions they associate with eachspecific emotion The answers were compiled into frequency lists andsynonyms were grouped together The three most frequently namedbehaviours for each emotion were retained Due to overlap between someemotions this procedure yielded a list of 22 behaviours For the second step atotal of 44 participants 28 women and 16 men with a mean age of 226years were asked to rate for each behaviour and each of the nine emotionsthe likelihood of observing the behaviour in a person experiencing theemotion using a 7-point scale (1 very unlikely 7 very likely) Behavioursthat received a mean rating of 6 or above for only one emotion comprise thefinal scale

These consisted of the following items6 to laughto get excited (happiness)to trembleto freeze (fear) to hitto insultto criticise (anger) to cryto isolateoneself (sadness) to grimaceto vomit (disgust) to stareto look hard at(contempt) to smileto relaxto contemplate (serenity) to withdrawto loweronersquos headto blush (shame) to justify oneselfto apologise (guilt) On theprofile measure participants were asked to indicate the likelihood as apercentage that they would show each of the behaviours in a situation like theone described in the vignettes

Data analyses Each participant responded to one scenario for each of theseven emotions themes and used only one type of scale As in Study 1 thedata were collapsed over scenarios Because we had responses from morewomen than men for both dependent measures the data for the femaleparticipants were weighted to create equal cell sizes Profile analyses acrossthe nine emotional reactionsbehaviours were conducted to assess sexdifferences

6These items were translated from the original French by the authors

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 625

Results and discussion

As noted earlier the goal of Study 2 was to assess to what degree the self-perceptions of the men and women who participated in this study overlap withthe general stereotypes found in Study 1 To accomplish this the emotionprofiles from Study 1 were compared with the self-reported emotional profilesand with the behavioural reaction profiles collected here

Self-described emotion profiles The means and standard deviations for thenine scales of the emotion profiles for male and female participants arepresented in Table 3 A comparison of these means with those of the profilesfrom Study 1 reveals substantial similarities between the emotional reactionsexpected for oneself and those expected for men and women in general

Behavioral reactions Table 3 shows the means and standard deviations forthe nine behavioural reaction profiles These profiles represent the participantsself-report of the likelihood that they would display these specific behaviours inthe situations described by the vignettes As the focus of this paper is on sex

TABLE 3Means and standard deviations for self-perceptions of emotional reactionsbehaviours

for men and women (Study 2)

Men Women

Situation Mean SD Mean SD

AngerHappiness 262 1224 006 054Laughget excited 790 1826 429 1168Serenity 262 827 135 532Smilerelaxcontemplate 865 2068 435 1185Sadness 2359 2390 4405 3151Cryisolate oneself 935 2083 1825 2250Fear 603 1589 486 1070Tremblefreeze 332 814 630 1155Anger 6268 2873 6076 2928Hitinsultcriticise 3540 3042 2654 2873Disgust 1175 2447 1094 1997Grimacevomit 194 553 286 854Contempt 1865 2505 2102 2543Starelook hard at 2065 2718 1156 2216Shame 286 827 802 1887Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 1044 2187 1038 1642Guilt 349 826 491 1582Justify oneselfapologise 2045 3072 1761 2663

(Continued)

626 HESS ET AL

TABLE 3(Continued)

Men Women

Situation Mean SD Mean SD

DisgustHappiness 611 1714 143 575Laughget excited 1989 2669 915 1825Serenity 611 1855 208 1159Smilerelaxcontemplate 1159t 2113 578 1482Sadness 516 1537 490 1531Cryisolate oneself 073 403 346 1352Fear 373t 1066 911 2018Tremblefreeze 476t 1154 1015 1977Anger 1359 2146 1437 2521Hitinsultcriticise 1214 2210 1186 2151Disgust 5086 3257 5881 3178Grimacevomit 1167 2121 1692 2236Contempt 1798 2226 1750 2706Starelook hard at 1991 2362 1686 2363Shame 1023 1972 1683 2738Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 645 1663 1169 2337Guilt 262 937 119 378Justify oneselfapologise 992 2511 744 1924

SadnessHappiness 317 1280 412 1594Laughget excited 123 789 128 114Serenity 887t 2017 318 1456Smilerelaxcontemplate 621 1848 346 1196Sadness 7690 2816 8251 2258Cryisolate oneself 6008 3131 6736 3059Fear 849t 1820 1546 2637Tremblefreeze 1595 2763 1135 2068Anger 1825 2641 2261 2919Hitinsultcriticise 532 1399 641 1517Disgust 651t 2015 176 940Grimacevomit 790 2017 353 1318Contempt 659 2125 332 1121Starelook hard at 000 000 045 397Shame 214 1050 141 711Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 2008 2916 724 1680Guilt 1524 2494 2141 2985Justify oneselfapologise 315 1065 391 1478

FearHappiness 317 1487 006 054Laughget excited 203 1054 058 361Serenity 587 1698 082 327

(Continued overleaf)

627

TABLE 3(Continued)

Men Women

Situation Mean SD Mean SD

Smilerelaxcontemplate 1048 2243 182 666Sadness 2333 3051 2929 3588Cryisolate oneself 1306 2536 3022 3582Fear 5111 3207 7535 2715Tremblefreeze 2008 2565 3378 3378Anger 2468 3297 1954 2949Hitinsultcriticise 1222 2098 446 1410Disgust 787 1808 1006 2206Grimacevomit 429 1270 365 1115Contempt 1192 2216 1141 2078Starelook hard at 677 1822 391 1405Shame 143 470 200 615Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 1606 2579 1000 2117Guilt 794 2199 369 995Justify oneselfapologise 282 1263 276 1319

ShameHappiness 452 1596 144 1039Laughget excited 1825 2905 1387 1990Serenity 444 1492 182 1028Smilerelaxcontemplate 1206t 2333 623 1262Sadness 1151 2121 2077 2361Cryisolate oneself 334 877 426 1107Fear 1246 2431 1135 1700Tremblefreeze 776 1569 894 1491Anger 1262 2259 1432 2408Hitinsultcriticise 565 1478 314 1140Disgust 206 966 347 1244Grimacevomit 202 590 231 1086Contempt 730 1532 811 1880Starelook hard at 347 833 304 1160Shame 4819 3534 5968 2948Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 2563 2974 2885 2908Guilt 3095 3442 4788 3282Justify oneselfapologise 4379 3144 4256 3074

GuiltHappiness 1024 2432 355 1189Laughget excited 734 2259 584 1761Serenity 262 1008 223 771Smilerelaxcontemplate 645 1692 416 1409Sadness 2003t 2705 2971 3390Cryisolate oneself 960 1992 2273 2979Fear 1778 2667 2653 3305

(Continued)

628

differences we will not discuss these data in detail However two things arenoteworthy First both men and women report lower probabilities that theywould react with a certain behaviour for example lsquolsquoto laughto get excitedrsquorsquothan with the emotion that corresponds to the behaviour (happiness) Thisfinding is not unexpected as individuals do not always express their emotionsoutwardly or may have developed idiosyncratic means of expressing certainemotions Second the profile data for the behaviours resemble strongly theemotional reactions reported For example for anger the highest means arefound for to hitto insultto criticise for to cryto isolate one self and for to stare

TABLE 3(Continued)

Men Women

Situation Mean SD Mean SD

Tremblefreeze 1206 2212 1227 2024Anger 1762 2980 1926 2950Hitinsultcriticise 129 543 221 720Disgust 1248 2569 1152 2402Grimacevomit 581 1642 351 1385Contempt 1603 2857 1464 2611Starelook hard at 129 495 136 485Shame 2667 3227 5375 3467Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 1952 2472 1769 2333Guilt 5071 3885 5753 3372Justify oneselfapologise 4484 3581 4286 3608

HappinessHappiness 8913 1981 9106 1471Laughget excited 5763 3420 6069 3283Serenity 2738t 3650 3906 3797Smilerelaxcontemplate 5451 3445 4647 3432Sadness 127 946 020 123Cryisolate oneself 040 318 029 141Fear 103 372 206 680Tremblefreeze 419t 1313 090 057Anger 032 252 000 000Hitinsultcriticise 000 000 013 114Disgust 048 378 000 000Grimacevomit 000 000 000 000Contempt 081 522 000 000Starelook hard at 355 1392 147 388Shame 111 764 000 000Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 718 1905 687 1859Guilt 270 1526 000 000Justify oneselfapologise 355 1535 090 340

Note Significant differences between men and women tp lt 1 p lt 05 p lt 01 p lt 001

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 629

to look hard at which correspond to anger sadness and contempt reactionsrespectively

However a number of differences between these two types of profiles canalso be observed For example for the emotional reaction profiles for anger andsadness the second highest mean is found for guilt whereas for the behaviouralreaction profiles for these emotions the second highest mean is found for shamebehaviours (to withdrawto lower onersquos headto blush) This findings may be dueto the general confusion between shame and guilt that has been observed forWestern cultures (see eg Wallbott amp Scherer 1994)

Sex differences To assess whether male and female participants differedwith regard to their expected emotional reactions and behaviours in the differentemotion eliciting situations profile analyses were conducted on the ratings foreach emotion situation All analyses and post-hoc tests were conducted at analpha level of 05 The results are shown in Table 4

TABLE 4Results of profile analyses on self-reported likelihood

of emotional reactionsbehaviours for men andwomen (Study 2)

Vignettes F df p

AngerReactions 295 8116 005Behaviours 183 8113 079

DisgustReactions 169 8115 107Behaviours 173 8116 099

FearReactions 330 8116 002Behaviours 390 8116 001

SadnessReactions 207 8116 044Behaviours 170 8115 105

GuiltReactions 186 8117 071Behaviours 130 8115 251

ShameReactions 215 8116 037Behaviours 70 8116 689

HappinessReactions 106 8116 397Behaviours 109 8116 376

630 HESS ET AL

Emotional reactions For all emotion situations except disgust andhappiness the emotional reactions profiles were nonparallel or marginallynonparallel (see Table 4) For the nonparallel profiles post-hoc tests revealedthat a similar pattern of sex differences emerged across the different emotionthemes For happiness and serenity there were either no significant differencesbetween men and women or men reported experiencing these emotions with ahigher probability than did women Conversely for sadness fear shame andguilt there were either no significant sex differences or women reported feelingthese emotions with a higher probability than did men For anger disgust andcontempt reactions no significant differences emerged

Emotional behaviour profiles Only the fear profile was significantlynonparallel (different) for men and women The profiles for anger and disgustwere marginally nonparallel and the remaining profiles were all parallel andcoincident Thus fewer significant differences between menrsquos and womenrsquosexpected behaviours in the situations described by the vignettes were found thanwas the case for the expected emotional reactions in Studies 1 and 2 Yet it isimportant to note that the probabilities reported for the behavioural profiles werelower overall and it is thus possible that this lack of differences is due to a lackof sensitivity of the measure

As postulated based on previous research (eg Crawford Clippax OnyxGault amp Benton 1992) as well as on the emotional reactions profile womenreport a higher probability of either crying or isolating oneself in an angersituation than do men Conversely and in accordance with both the literature onanger expression (see earlier) and the results from the emotional reactionsprofile men report it more likely to hitto insultto criticise than women thoughthis difference is not significant In addition they report that they aresignificantly more likely to stareto look hard (contempt) than do women abehaviour that could also be interpreted as aggressive when shown in responseto an insult

As regards the disgust situations men report that they are more likely tolaughto get excited This sex difference matches the finding for the emotionalreactions profile but was not found in Study 1 Finally for the fear situation menreport that they are more likely to hitto insultto criticise as well as to smiletorelaxto contemplate (serenity) than do women The emotional reactions profilefor fear from this study shows that men report a higher probability of reactingwith serenity but not with anger than do women As these behaviourscorrespond to a macho or cool demeanour in a threatening situation they fit thegeneral stereotype of masculine behaviour Conversely women report to bemore likely to trembleto freeze as well as to cryto isolate one self in fearsituations

In sum although many fewer sex differences reached significance whencomparing self-reported expected behaviours for men and women the pattern of

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 631

results is largely congruent with previous findings Specifically women reporteda higher probability of showing behaviours congruent with sadness and fear thandid men whereas men reported higher probabilities for anger and serenebehaviours In addition men reported a higher probability of showing acontempt behaviour in an anger situation yet the relevant behaviour (to staretolook hard) could be interpreted as aggressive in that context

How congruent are the findings fromStudies 1 and 2

As mentioned earlier not all significant differences found in Study 1 for theexpected reactions for men and women in general were also found for self-reports of expected reactions by men and women for themselves Yet as theresults for the two studies are based on different degrees of freedomsignificance levels cannot be directly compared To assess whether stereotypicaland self-reported sex differences were of similar magnitude we computed theeffect sizes for both studies Table 5 shows Cohenrsquos d for the post-hoc

TABLE 5Cohenrsquos d for sex differences in Studies 1 and 2

Study 1 Study 2

SituationEmotionalreactions

Emotionalreactions

Emotionalbehaviours

AngerHappiness 7023Serenity 7025Sadness 203 073 041Fear 123 030Anger 7055 7030Disgust 068Contempt 7026Shame 117 7035Guilt 129

DisgustHappiness 7032 7037 7047Serenity 7045 7026 7021Sadness 095 027Fear 189 033 033AngerDisgust 160 024 024Contempt 050Shame 062 7028 026Guilt 062 020

(Continued)

632 HESS ET AL

TABLE 5(Continued)

Study 1 Study 2

SituationEmotionalreactions

Emotionalreactions

Emotionalbehaviours

SadnessHappiness 7053Serenity 7032Sadness 184 022 024Fear 171 031Anger 7065 042Disgust 7030 7025Contempt 021Shame 020 7046 054Guilt 176 022 7033

FearHappiness 7021 7030Serenity 7026 7041 7052Sadness 189 055Fear 221 082 046Anger 7084 7043Disgust 067ContemptShame 049 7026Guilt 172 7025

ShameHappiness 7045 7023Serenity 7027 7020 7031Sadness 175 041Fear 128Anger 7069Disgust 065Contempt 054Shame 154 035Guilt 153 050

GuiltHappiness 7107 7035Serenity 7051Sadness 198 032 051Fear 162 029AngerDisgust 128Contempt 075Shame 178 051Guilt 183 020

633

comparisons for each emotion in the profile for the six negative emotionsituations across the two studies For Study 1 the effect sizes for the urban andthe rural sample were combined To facilitate the reading of the table onlydifferences for which d was at least 020 (ie equivalent to a small effect) areshown In general effect sizes for Study 1 are larger than those for Study 2 Foremotional reactions the expected differences between men and women were ofmedium (gt 050) to large (gt 080) size whereas for self-perceptions the expecteddifferences between men and women were small to medium in size

The most stable sex difference across the two studies was found for sadnessboth as a core emotion in sadness vignettes and as a secondary emotion That isfor all negative emotions the general stereotype describes women as reactingwith more sadness and women also perceive themselves as reacting with moresadness andor report more sadness behaviours Further women are expected toreact with (and they self-report) more shame and guilt reactionsbehaviours inshame and guilt situations However for the other negative emotions (angerdisgust sadness and fear) men report higher levels of shame reactions or shamebehaviours (but not both) Finally fear reactions and behaviours are described asmore likely for women in general and women perceive themselves as reactingwith more fear in disgust sadness fear and guilt situations

Another very stable sex difference across studies regards happiness andserenity reactions for negative emotion vignettes Men consistently are bothexpected to react with and self-report more happiness reactions as well ashappiness behaviours for disgust fear and shame vignettes To a lesser degreethis pattern also emerges for sadness and guilt vignettes As mentioned in thediscussion of Study 1 this may reflect differences in the value structure betweenmen and women

In sum a comparison of effect sizes shows considerable consistency acrossthe two studies Specifically noteworthy is the very consistent finding for boththe stereotypical beliefs and the self-reports with regard to sadness reactionswhich are considered as more likely for women than for men for all negativeemotion situations studied

However a number of differences between the general stereotypes and theself-perceptions also emerged specifically with regard to shame reactionsWhereas women are generally believed to be more likely to react with shameto negative emotion events the self-reported likelihood for shame as aconcomitant emotion is higher for men for all situations except for guilt(given the general confusion regarding these states observed in Westerncultures this may be due to shame being a core rather than a concomitantemotion for guilt scenarios) Yet self-reported shame behaviours are morelikely for women than for men in sadness and disgust situations A possibleexplanation is that men are actively trying to not show shame reactionsmdashtoconform to the general stereotypemdashbut are aware that they nonetheless arelikely to feel shame in those situations

634 HESS ET AL

To conclude the general stereotype and self-perceptions of emotionalreactions and behaviours suggest that women react with more sadness to all typesof negative emotion events Further the stereotypes and the self-perceptions arein agreement on menrsquos greater likelihood to react with happiness and serenity to avariety of negative emotions In contrast differences between the generalstereotypes and self-perceptions emerge for shame reactions with men reportingin situations when shame is a secondary emotion a higher likelihood of shamereactions but not necessarily shame behaviours than do women

STUDY 3

The results from Study 2 suggest that the stereotypical beliefs regarding menrsquosand womenrsquos emotional reactions and behaviours in a variety of emotion-inducing situations converge with self-perceptions of menrsquos and womenrsquosemotional reactions and behaviours in those same situations This finding isconsistent with the notion that autobiographic statements that requireparticipants to summarise over a number of related experiences may be biasedby stereotypical expectations (see eg Feldman-Barrett et al 1998) This leadsto the question of whether a similar overlap can also be found for narratives ofsingle specific emotional events from the participantsrsquo past If stereotypesindeed influence the way emotional events are reconstructed in a narrative wewould expect to find that women report more sadness events and express moresadness overall as well as more intense target emotions for all but anger eventsConversely we would expect men to report more situations involving anger aswell as experiencing more happiness and serenity overall

However as Study 3 is based on personal narratives and not on standardisedvignettes such a finding could simply be due to the fact that the emotionantecedent events in a real-life setting differ for men and women To assess thispossibility we decided to measure the emotion antecedent events by means of anappraisal questionnaire that assesses the participantsrsquo perception of the emotionantecedent situation To the degree that perceptions of emotion antecedents aresimilar for men and women while reported emotional reactions differ we canconclude that observed sex differences are not due to differences in theperception of the event per se For example if womenrsquos tendency to report moresadness were due to a difference in the perception of the emotion antecedentsituation we would expect women to report more often that they did not feel thatthey could do anything to change the situation or that they had to adapt to thesituation (as sadness is generally associated with the notion of irrevocable loss)

Overview

For this study we translated and adapted a questionnaire reported by Scherer(1988) that consists of two parts The first part invites the participants todescribe an event during which they experienced an emotion The second part

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 635

asks specific questions regarding the appraisal process We added a section inwhich we asked participants to complete an emotion profile for the event Toavoid the possibility that men and women would relate narratives from widelydifferent types of situations we asked participants to describe an event related tofamily interactions This class of situations should be readily accessible to allparticipants and ensure that emotional events involving human interactionpartners were reported

Allowing participants to choose the type of emotional events they report hasseveral advantages Most importantly we can assess what type of emotionalevents men and women choose to report spontaneously It also permitsparticipants to choose a salient event for which they can recollect theinformation necessary to respond to the appraisal questions On the other handthis approach is unlikely to result in a well-balanced distribution of emotiontopics thus making it difficult or impossible to analyse the data separately fordifferent emotion themes Yet in the context of the present study we were onlyinterested in sex differences in reports and not in absolute levels of responsesStudies 1 and 2 suggest that sex differences are very stable across all negativeemotions We therefore decided to allow participants to choose the emotiontheme and analysed the data collapsed across all negative emotion themes

Method

Participants A total of 171 students 87 men and 84 women with a meanage of 1862 years participated in this study Most of the participants (147) wererecruited from an ethnically homogenous junior college in the larger Montrealurban area (Cegep Lionel-Groulx Ste-Therese Quebec Canada) and partici-pated in groups An additional 24 participants were recruited individually

Procedure The experimenter explained that the study concerned emotionalevents in peoplersquos lives Participants were informed of their right to discontinueparticipation at any time and for any reason The experimenter then distributedthe questionnaires and responded to questions regarding the procedure The tasktook between 10 and 30 minutes Most of this time difference can be attributedto the amount of detail provided in the event description that ranged from acouple of words (eg birth of my daughter) to well over a page

Dependent measures The questionnaire consisted of four parts The firstpart was an open-ended question asking the participants to describe any eventinvolving their family life that led them to experience an emotion Sadnessshame anger guilt joy fear and disgust were provided as examples ofemotions Participants were asked to give a detailed description of the situationincluding the events that led up to it their reactions and those of others presentIn addition they were asked to identify the people involved with respect to their

636 HESS ET AL

relationship with them (eg my partner my sister etc) as well as to identify themain emotion theme of the story This served to ensure that the participantsbased their answers to the following questions on a specific event and not on aclass of similar events

Emotion description The second part of the questionnaire consisted ofquestions regarding when the event happened for how long they felt theemotion and the intensity of the core emotion identified as the emotion theme ofthe story Participants were also asked to indicate whether they tried to hide orcontrol their feelings and to what degree This part also contained the emotionprofile used in Studies 1 and 2 Using this measure participants were asked toindicate to what percentage they had felt each of the nine emotions from theprofile

Appraisal questionnaire A series of questions regarding the appraisal processwere used to assess the emotion antecedent events These questions weretranslated from the questionnaire reported by Scherer (1988) Specificallyparticipants were asked to what degree they had expected the situation to occurhow pleasant or unpleasant they considered the event whether the event helpedor hindered them in achieving their aims to what degree they considered that thesituation or the event that caused the emotion was unjust or unfair whether theevent was caused by their own or by someone elsersquos behaviour to what degreethey considered that the behaviour that caused the event would be judged asimproper or immoral by their acquaintances how the event affected theirfeelings about themselves such as their self-esteem or self-confidence andfinally to what degree the event changed their relationships with the peopleinvolved (all on negative-positive 7-point bipolar scales)

In addition participants were given a list of 11 specific potential causes of theevent (caused it myself natural causes act of god etc) They also evaluatedtheir ability to act upon or to cope with the event and its consequences using ascale involving 5 options The last part of the questionnaire consisted ofquestions regarding the participantsrsquo sex their age and whether they werecurrently seeing someone in a love-based relationship and if so for how long

Results

Of the 171 reported emotion events 147 (74 reported by men and 73 reported bywomen) concerned negative emotional events Of these a total of 62 weresadness events 22 were anger events and 11 were guilt events The remainingevents were distributed over a large number of negative emotions

As expected the very low frequency of reports for specific emotion themesmade separate analyses of reports of these events unfeasible We thereforedecided to perform analyses on the data summed over all negative emotionthemes The 24 events with positive emotion themes were obviously excludedfrom these analyses

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 637

Do women report more sadness events and men more anger events Toaddress this question a chi-square test was performed on the frequency withwhich men and women labeled the reported event as a sad versus an anger eventIn line with the results of Studies 1 and 2 we found men to report more angerevents and women to report more sadness events Specifically 14 men and 8women reported anger events and 25 men and 37 women reported sad events w2

= 355 p = 06 d = 42Do women report more intense core emotions than men For the intensity of

the core emotion experienced during the event women reported significantlyhigher levels (M = 593 SD = 101) than men (M = 554 SD = 123) t(145) =222 p = 028 d = 37

Do women and men report different levels of negative emotions across theemotion profile Figure 2 presents the emotion profiles separately for men andwomen An inspection of the profiles shows that overall men report morehappinessserenity whereas women report higher levels of all other emotionsThe profiles are nonparallel F(8 137) = 5877 p lt 001 Post-hoc analysesrevealed a significant sex difference in self-reported sadness with womenreporting higher levels than men To compare the sex differences in the profiles

Figure 2 Emotion profile for menrsquos and womenrsquos self-reported emotional reactions to negativeemotion events (Study 3)

638 HESS ET AL

found in this study with those from Studies 1 and 2 effect sizes were calculatedUsing the same cut-off point as previously (small effect size d = 020) only twodifferences were found to be stable across the three studies Men report higherlevels of happiness for negative emotion events (d = 7022) and women reporthigher levels of sadness (d = 043) As the latter difference may be due to thehigher frequency of reported sadness events by women we also verified whetherwomen report higher levels of sadness when sadness events are excluded fromthe analysis An inspection of the means revealed a marginally significantdifference in the same direction M = 6472 SD = 3247 and M = 5108 SD =3684 for women and men respectively t(83) = 181 p = 074 d = 40

Are there differences in appraisal patterns between men and women Asmentioned earlier the reported differences in emotional reactions could be dueto differences in the perception of the emotion antecedent events Yet nodifferences in appraisal patterns were found suggesting that emotion antecedentevents were perceived similarly In addition despite the more frequent and moreintense reports of sadness women did not report different coping styles thanmen and did not seem to feel more helpless (38 men vs 34 women report thisreaction) In fact women more frequently report that they felt able to lsquolsquoinfluencethe situation positivelyrsquorsquo (19 women vs 9 men report this reaction though thedifference is not significant)

Discussion

Study 3 extended the study of emotion stereotypes and self-perceptions based onvignettes to narratives of emotional events that the participants had in factexperienced themselves The goal of the study was to investigate whether thefindings from Studies 1 and 2 generalise to such recollections of personal eventsThe results strongly suggest this to be the case Women again report higherlevels of sadness for negative emotion events They also report more sad eventsin general Men on the other hand report more anger events as well as morehappiness for negative emotion events as was found in both Studies 1 and 2 Yetno reported differences in appraisal or coping emerged This suggests that theobserved differences in emotional reactions are not due to a bias in the appraisalprocess nor to an inability to act upon the event

If emotion antecedents do not differ why are differences in emotionalreactions reported We suggest that such differences represent an influence ofthe general emotion stereotype on the narrative reconstruction of a personalevent This conclusion is based on the observation of a null effect and thus opento the critique that the present study lacked the power necessary to detect realdifferences in appraisal between men and women To assess this critique wecalculated the absolute mean effect size for the interval-scaled appraisalquestions to be d = 015 To achieve 80 power a sample of 1100 participantswould be needed These data underscore the very slim differences in appraisals

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 639

between men and women making it highly unlikely that the effects observed inthis study are mediated by a difference in appraisal and thus by a difference inthe perception of the underlying event

CONCLUSIONS

The present series of studies had the goal to assess general emotion stereotypesand their influence on self-perceptions of emotional reactions by men andwomen We wanted to both describe these stereotypes in more detail with regardnot only to the modal emotion for a specific event (such as sadness reactions to aloss) but also with regard to the secondary emotions present in these situationsFurther we wanted to assess to what degree such expectations for men andwomen in general are endorsed by individuals for themselves as well as whetherthey would be spontaneously reported when relating a personally experiencedevent

Two gender differences were found to be stable across all three experimentalparadigms Women are expected to be more likely to react with sadness in allnegative emotion situations they expect themselves to be more likely to reactwith sadness as well as to cry and to withdraw more and finally women reportmore sadness in personal events In contrast men are expected to react withmore happinessserenity during negative emotional situations they expectthemselves to react more frequently this way as well as to laugh and smile moreand to be more relaxed They also tend to report more happiness whendescribing negative personal events

Not all general emotion stereotypes were found in the self-perceptionsstudied in Studies 2 and 3 Specifically according to Study 1 women areexpected to be more likely to react with shame and guilt in all negative emotionsituations Yet women did not expect to do so for themselves in situations otherthan shame and guilt situations and in fact men reported to be more likely toreact with shame in a variety of situations Further men and women did notreport any differences with regard to experiences of shame and guilt during thepersonal events

Study 3 included an appraisal questionnaire to address the question whetherthe self-reported differences in emotionality between men and women are due todifferences in the appraisal of the emotion antecedent events or rather to theinfluence of the prevalent norms No differences in appraisals were detectedsuggesting that the self-reported differences may be due to the normative forcesof the general stereotype rather than to appraisal differences

It may be argued that the Study 3 is based on recollections of past events andthat self-reports of emotional experiences represent after the fact reconstructionsthat differ from the actually experienced emotions during the event (seeParkinson amp Manstead 1993) A related argument may be made for Study 2where participants had to estimate the likelihood of their emotional reactions to

640 HESS ET AL

hypothetical events (even though the latter were chosen to be common everydayevents) This may well be true Yet the question remains why did men andwomen reconstruct the events differently in terms of their emotional reactionsThe answer would then be that the prevalent emotion stereotype which islargely endorsed by the population studied influenced this reconstruction Yetas peoplesrsquo sense of self depends on their past histories this would imply thatreconstructions of emotional events in line with emotion stereotypes mayeventually lead individuals to conform more closely to these stereotypes as theybecome more and more part of their emotional history and eventually of theiremotional self

Manuscript received 30 May 1997Revised manuscript received 23 February 2000

REFERENCES

Adams S Kuebli J Boyle PA amp Fivush R (1995) Gender differences in parent-childconversations about past emotions A longitudinal investigation Sex Roles 33 309ndash323

Allen JG amp Haccoun DM (1976) Sex differences in emotionality A multidimensional approachHuman Relations 29 711ndash722

Averill JR (1997) The emotions An integrative approach In R Hogan JA Johnson amp SRBriggs (Eds) Handbook of personality psychology (pp 513ndash541) San Diego CA AcademicPress

Birnbaum DW (1983) Preschoolersrsquo stereotypes about sex differences in emotionality Areaffirmation Journal of Genetic Psychology 143 139ndash140

Briton NJ amp Hall JA (1995) Gender-based expectancies and observer judgements of smilingJournal of Nonverbal Behavior 19 49ndash65

Brody LR amp Hall JA (1993) Gender and emotion In M Lewis amp JM Haviland (Eds)Handbook of emotions (pp 447-460) New York Guilford Press

Crawford J Clippax S Onyx J Gault U amp Benton P (1992) Emotion and genderConstructing meaning from memory London Sage

Dunn J Bretherton I amp Munn P (1987) Conversations about feeling states between mothers andtheir children Developmental Psychology 23 132ndash139

Eagly AH amp Mladinic A (1989) Gender stereotypes and attitudes toward women and menPersonality and Social Psychology Bulletin 15 543ndash558

Ekman P amp Friesen W (1986) A new pan-cultural facial expression of emotion Motivation andEmotion 10 159ndash168

Feldman-Barrett L Robin L Pietromonaco PR amp Eysell KM (1998) Are women the moreemotional sex Evidence from emotional experiences in social context Cognition and Emotion12 555ndash578

Fernandez-Dols J-M amp Ruiz-Belda M-A (1995) Are smiles a sign of happiness Gold medalwinners at the Olympic Games Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 69 1113ndash1119

Fischer A (1993) Sex differences in emotionality Fact or stereotype Feminism and Psychology 3303ndash318

Fivush R (1989) Exploring differences in the emotional content of mother child conversationsabout the past Sex Roles 20 675ndash691

Frank MG amp Ekman P (1993) Not all smiles are created equal The differences betweenenjoyment and nonenjoymen t smiles [Special Issue Current issues in psychological humorresearch] Humor International Journal of Humor Research 6 9ndash26

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 641

Gallois C (1994) Group membership social rules and power A social psychologica l perspectiveon emotional communication Journal of Pragmatics 22 301ndash324

Hall JA (1984) Nonverbal sex differences Communication accuracy and expressive styleBaltimore MD Johns Hopkins University Press

Izard C (1972) Patterns of emotions A new analysis of anxiety and depression New YorkAcademic Press

Jussim L Milbourn M amp Nelson W (1991) Emotional openness Sex-role stereotypes and self-perceptions Representative Research in Social Psychology 19 35ndash52

Kirouac G amp Hess U (1999) Group membership and the decoding of nonverbal behavior In PPhilippot R Feldman amp E Coats (Eds) The social context of nonverbal behavior (pp 182ndash210) New York Cambridge University Press

Kring AM amp Gordon AH (1998) Sex differences in emotion Expression experience andphysiology Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74 686ndash703

LaFrance M amp Banaji M (1992) Toward a reconsideration of the gender-emotion relationship InMS Clark (Ed) Emotion and social behavior Review of personality and social psychology(Vol 14 pp 178ndash201) Newbury Park CA Sage

LaFrance M amp Hecht MA (1995) Why smiles generate leniency Personality and SocialPsychology Bulletin 21 207ndash214

Lazarus RS (1991) Emotion and adaptation Oxford UK Oxford University PressParkinson B amp Manstead ASR (1993) Making sense of emotion in stories and social life

Cognition and Emotion 7 295ndash323Plutchik R (1980) Emotion A psychoevolutionar y synthesis New York Harper amp RowRime B Mesquita B Philippot P amp Boca S (1991) Beyond the emotional event Six studies on

the social sharing of emotion Cognition and Emotion 5 435ndash465Scherer KR (1988) Appendix C Questionnaire used in the International Survey on Emotion

Antecedents and Reactions (ISEAR) In KR Scherer (Ed) Facets of emotion Recent researchHillsdale NJ Erlbaum

Sherman JW amp Bessenhoff GR (1999) Stereotypes as source monitoring cues On theinteraction between episodic and semantic memory Psychological Science 10 106ndash110

Stoppard JM amp Gruchy CD (1993) Gender context and expression of positive emotionPersonality and Social Psychology Bulletin 19 143ndash150

Tucker JS amp Riggio RE (1988) The role of social skills in encoding posed and spontaneousfacial expressions Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 12 87ndash97

Wallbott HG amp Scherer KR (1994) Cultural determinants in experiencing shame and guilt InJune Price Tangney amp Kurt W Fischer (Eds) Self conscious emotions The psychology of shameand guilt embarrasment and pride (pp 465ndash487) New York Guilford Press

642 HESS ET AL

Dependent measures

Emotion profiles These were computed in the same manner as in Study 1That is responses were averaged across the vignettes representing each specificemotion theme

Behavioural reactions scale This scale is intended to assess thebehavioural reactions that are expected for someone who is experiencing theemotional state in question To construct the scale a two-step procedure wasemployed

First 68 students of the University of Quebec at Montreal 54 women and 14men with a mean age of 279 years were asked to list for each of nineemotions (happiness serenity anger disgust fear contempt sadness shameand guilt) the behaviours and observable reactions they associate with eachspecific emotion The answers were compiled into frequency lists andsynonyms were grouped together The three most frequently namedbehaviours for each emotion were retained Due to overlap between someemotions this procedure yielded a list of 22 behaviours For the second step atotal of 44 participants 28 women and 16 men with a mean age of 226years were asked to rate for each behaviour and each of the nine emotionsthe likelihood of observing the behaviour in a person experiencing theemotion using a 7-point scale (1 very unlikely 7 very likely) Behavioursthat received a mean rating of 6 or above for only one emotion comprise thefinal scale

These consisted of the following items6 to laughto get excited (happiness)to trembleto freeze (fear) to hitto insultto criticise (anger) to cryto isolateoneself (sadness) to grimaceto vomit (disgust) to stareto look hard at(contempt) to smileto relaxto contemplate (serenity) to withdrawto loweronersquos headto blush (shame) to justify oneselfto apologise (guilt) On theprofile measure participants were asked to indicate the likelihood as apercentage that they would show each of the behaviours in a situation like theone described in the vignettes

Data analyses Each participant responded to one scenario for each of theseven emotions themes and used only one type of scale As in Study 1 thedata were collapsed over scenarios Because we had responses from morewomen than men for both dependent measures the data for the femaleparticipants were weighted to create equal cell sizes Profile analyses acrossthe nine emotional reactionsbehaviours were conducted to assess sexdifferences

6These items were translated from the original French by the authors

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 625

Results and discussion

As noted earlier the goal of Study 2 was to assess to what degree the self-perceptions of the men and women who participated in this study overlap withthe general stereotypes found in Study 1 To accomplish this the emotionprofiles from Study 1 were compared with the self-reported emotional profilesand with the behavioural reaction profiles collected here

Self-described emotion profiles The means and standard deviations for thenine scales of the emotion profiles for male and female participants arepresented in Table 3 A comparison of these means with those of the profilesfrom Study 1 reveals substantial similarities between the emotional reactionsexpected for oneself and those expected for men and women in general

Behavioral reactions Table 3 shows the means and standard deviations forthe nine behavioural reaction profiles These profiles represent the participantsself-report of the likelihood that they would display these specific behaviours inthe situations described by the vignettes As the focus of this paper is on sex

TABLE 3Means and standard deviations for self-perceptions of emotional reactionsbehaviours

for men and women (Study 2)

Men Women

Situation Mean SD Mean SD

AngerHappiness 262 1224 006 054Laughget excited 790 1826 429 1168Serenity 262 827 135 532Smilerelaxcontemplate 865 2068 435 1185Sadness 2359 2390 4405 3151Cryisolate oneself 935 2083 1825 2250Fear 603 1589 486 1070Tremblefreeze 332 814 630 1155Anger 6268 2873 6076 2928Hitinsultcriticise 3540 3042 2654 2873Disgust 1175 2447 1094 1997Grimacevomit 194 553 286 854Contempt 1865 2505 2102 2543Starelook hard at 2065 2718 1156 2216Shame 286 827 802 1887Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 1044 2187 1038 1642Guilt 349 826 491 1582Justify oneselfapologise 2045 3072 1761 2663

(Continued)

626 HESS ET AL

TABLE 3(Continued)

Men Women

Situation Mean SD Mean SD

DisgustHappiness 611 1714 143 575Laughget excited 1989 2669 915 1825Serenity 611 1855 208 1159Smilerelaxcontemplate 1159t 2113 578 1482Sadness 516 1537 490 1531Cryisolate oneself 073 403 346 1352Fear 373t 1066 911 2018Tremblefreeze 476t 1154 1015 1977Anger 1359 2146 1437 2521Hitinsultcriticise 1214 2210 1186 2151Disgust 5086 3257 5881 3178Grimacevomit 1167 2121 1692 2236Contempt 1798 2226 1750 2706Starelook hard at 1991 2362 1686 2363Shame 1023 1972 1683 2738Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 645 1663 1169 2337Guilt 262 937 119 378Justify oneselfapologise 992 2511 744 1924

SadnessHappiness 317 1280 412 1594Laughget excited 123 789 128 114Serenity 887t 2017 318 1456Smilerelaxcontemplate 621 1848 346 1196Sadness 7690 2816 8251 2258Cryisolate oneself 6008 3131 6736 3059Fear 849t 1820 1546 2637Tremblefreeze 1595 2763 1135 2068Anger 1825 2641 2261 2919Hitinsultcriticise 532 1399 641 1517Disgust 651t 2015 176 940Grimacevomit 790 2017 353 1318Contempt 659 2125 332 1121Starelook hard at 000 000 045 397Shame 214 1050 141 711Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 2008 2916 724 1680Guilt 1524 2494 2141 2985Justify oneselfapologise 315 1065 391 1478

FearHappiness 317 1487 006 054Laughget excited 203 1054 058 361Serenity 587 1698 082 327

(Continued overleaf)

627

TABLE 3(Continued)

Men Women

Situation Mean SD Mean SD

Smilerelaxcontemplate 1048 2243 182 666Sadness 2333 3051 2929 3588Cryisolate oneself 1306 2536 3022 3582Fear 5111 3207 7535 2715Tremblefreeze 2008 2565 3378 3378Anger 2468 3297 1954 2949Hitinsultcriticise 1222 2098 446 1410Disgust 787 1808 1006 2206Grimacevomit 429 1270 365 1115Contempt 1192 2216 1141 2078Starelook hard at 677 1822 391 1405Shame 143 470 200 615Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 1606 2579 1000 2117Guilt 794 2199 369 995Justify oneselfapologise 282 1263 276 1319

ShameHappiness 452 1596 144 1039Laughget excited 1825 2905 1387 1990Serenity 444 1492 182 1028Smilerelaxcontemplate 1206t 2333 623 1262Sadness 1151 2121 2077 2361Cryisolate oneself 334 877 426 1107Fear 1246 2431 1135 1700Tremblefreeze 776 1569 894 1491Anger 1262 2259 1432 2408Hitinsultcriticise 565 1478 314 1140Disgust 206 966 347 1244Grimacevomit 202 590 231 1086Contempt 730 1532 811 1880Starelook hard at 347 833 304 1160Shame 4819 3534 5968 2948Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 2563 2974 2885 2908Guilt 3095 3442 4788 3282Justify oneselfapologise 4379 3144 4256 3074

GuiltHappiness 1024 2432 355 1189Laughget excited 734 2259 584 1761Serenity 262 1008 223 771Smilerelaxcontemplate 645 1692 416 1409Sadness 2003t 2705 2971 3390Cryisolate oneself 960 1992 2273 2979Fear 1778 2667 2653 3305

(Continued)

628

differences we will not discuss these data in detail However two things arenoteworthy First both men and women report lower probabilities that theywould react with a certain behaviour for example lsquolsquoto laughto get excitedrsquorsquothan with the emotion that corresponds to the behaviour (happiness) Thisfinding is not unexpected as individuals do not always express their emotionsoutwardly or may have developed idiosyncratic means of expressing certainemotions Second the profile data for the behaviours resemble strongly theemotional reactions reported For example for anger the highest means arefound for to hitto insultto criticise for to cryto isolate one self and for to stare

TABLE 3(Continued)

Men Women

Situation Mean SD Mean SD

Tremblefreeze 1206 2212 1227 2024Anger 1762 2980 1926 2950Hitinsultcriticise 129 543 221 720Disgust 1248 2569 1152 2402Grimacevomit 581 1642 351 1385Contempt 1603 2857 1464 2611Starelook hard at 129 495 136 485Shame 2667 3227 5375 3467Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 1952 2472 1769 2333Guilt 5071 3885 5753 3372Justify oneselfapologise 4484 3581 4286 3608

HappinessHappiness 8913 1981 9106 1471Laughget excited 5763 3420 6069 3283Serenity 2738t 3650 3906 3797Smilerelaxcontemplate 5451 3445 4647 3432Sadness 127 946 020 123Cryisolate oneself 040 318 029 141Fear 103 372 206 680Tremblefreeze 419t 1313 090 057Anger 032 252 000 000Hitinsultcriticise 000 000 013 114Disgust 048 378 000 000Grimacevomit 000 000 000 000Contempt 081 522 000 000Starelook hard at 355 1392 147 388Shame 111 764 000 000Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 718 1905 687 1859Guilt 270 1526 000 000Justify oneselfapologise 355 1535 090 340

Note Significant differences between men and women tp lt 1 p lt 05 p lt 01 p lt 001

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 629

to look hard at which correspond to anger sadness and contempt reactionsrespectively

However a number of differences between these two types of profiles canalso be observed For example for the emotional reaction profiles for anger andsadness the second highest mean is found for guilt whereas for the behaviouralreaction profiles for these emotions the second highest mean is found for shamebehaviours (to withdrawto lower onersquos headto blush) This findings may be dueto the general confusion between shame and guilt that has been observed forWestern cultures (see eg Wallbott amp Scherer 1994)

Sex differences To assess whether male and female participants differedwith regard to their expected emotional reactions and behaviours in the differentemotion eliciting situations profile analyses were conducted on the ratings foreach emotion situation All analyses and post-hoc tests were conducted at analpha level of 05 The results are shown in Table 4

TABLE 4Results of profile analyses on self-reported likelihood

of emotional reactionsbehaviours for men andwomen (Study 2)

Vignettes F df p

AngerReactions 295 8116 005Behaviours 183 8113 079

DisgustReactions 169 8115 107Behaviours 173 8116 099

FearReactions 330 8116 002Behaviours 390 8116 001

SadnessReactions 207 8116 044Behaviours 170 8115 105

GuiltReactions 186 8117 071Behaviours 130 8115 251

ShameReactions 215 8116 037Behaviours 70 8116 689

HappinessReactions 106 8116 397Behaviours 109 8116 376

630 HESS ET AL

Emotional reactions For all emotion situations except disgust andhappiness the emotional reactions profiles were nonparallel or marginallynonparallel (see Table 4) For the nonparallel profiles post-hoc tests revealedthat a similar pattern of sex differences emerged across the different emotionthemes For happiness and serenity there were either no significant differencesbetween men and women or men reported experiencing these emotions with ahigher probability than did women Conversely for sadness fear shame andguilt there were either no significant sex differences or women reported feelingthese emotions with a higher probability than did men For anger disgust andcontempt reactions no significant differences emerged

Emotional behaviour profiles Only the fear profile was significantlynonparallel (different) for men and women The profiles for anger and disgustwere marginally nonparallel and the remaining profiles were all parallel andcoincident Thus fewer significant differences between menrsquos and womenrsquosexpected behaviours in the situations described by the vignettes were found thanwas the case for the expected emotional reactions in Studies 1 and 2 Yet it isimportant to note that the probabilities reported for the behavioural profiles werelower overall and it is thus possible that this lack of differences is due to a lackof sensitivity of the measure

As postulated based on previous research (eg Crawford Clippax OnyxGault amp Benton 1992) as well as on the emotional reactions profile womenreport a higher probability of either crying or isolating oneself in an angersituation than do men Conversely and in accordance with both the literature onanger expression (see earlier) and the results from the emotional reactionsprofile men report it more likely to hitto insultto criticise than women thoughthis difference is not significant In addition they report that they aresignificantly more likely to stareto look hard (contempt) than do women abehaviour that could also be interpreted as aggressive when shown in responseto an insult

As regards the disgust situations men report that they are more likely tolaughto get excited This sex difference matches the finding for the emotionalreactions profile but was not found in Study 1 Finally for the fear situation menreport that they are more likely to hitto insultto criticise as well as to smiletorelaxto contemplate (serenity) than do women The emotional reactions profilefor fear from this study shows that men report a higher probability of reactingwith serenity but not with anger than do women As these behaviourscorrespond to a macho or cool demeanour in a threatening situation they fit thegeneral stereotype of masculine behaviour Conversely women report to bemore likely to trembleto freeze as well as to cryto isolate one self in fearsituations

In sum although many fewer sex differences reached significance whencomparing self-reported expected behaviours for men and women the pattern of

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 631

results is largely congruent with previous findings Specifically women reporteda higher probability of showing behaviours congruent with sadness and fear thandid men whereas men reported higher probabilities for anger and serenebehaviours In addition men reported a higher probability of showing acontempt behaviour in an anger situation yet the relevant behaviour (to staretolook hard) could be interpreted as aggressive in that context

How congruent are the findings fromStudies 1 and 2

As mentioned earlier not all significant differences found in Study 1 for theexpected reactions for men and women in general were also found for self-reports of expected reactions by men and women for themselves Yet as theresults for the two studies are based on different degrees of freedomsignificance levels cannot be directly compared To assess whether stereotypicaland self-reported sex differences were of similar magnitude we computed theeffect sizes for both studies Table 5 shows Cohenrsquos d for the post-hoc

TABLE 5Cohenrsquos d for sex differences in Studies 1 and 2

Study 1 Study 2

SituationEmotionalreactions

Emotionalreactions

Emotionalbehaviours

AngerHappiness 7023Serenity 7025Sadness 203 073 041Fear 123 030Anger 7055 7030Disgust 068Contempt 7026Shame 117 7035Guilt 129

DisgustHappiness 7032 7037 7047Serenity 7045 7026 7021Sadness 095 027Fear 189 033 033AngerDisgust 160 024 024Contempt 050Shame 062 7028 026Guilt 062 020

(Continued)

632 HESS ET AL

TABLE 5(Continued)

Study 1 Study 2

SituationEmotionalreactions

Emotionalreactions

Emotionalbehaviours

SadnessHappiness 7053Serenity 7032Sadness 184 022 024Fear 171 031Anger 7065 042Disgust 7030 7025Contempt 021Shame 020 7046 054Guilt 176 022 7033

FearHappiness 7021 7030Serenity 7026 7041 7052Sadness 189 055Fear 221 082 046Anger 7084 7043Disgust 067ContemptShame 049 7026Guilt 172 7025

ShameHappiness 7045 7023Serenity 7027 7020 7031Sadness 175 041Fear 128Anger 7069Disgust 065Contempt 054Shame 154 035Guilt 153 050

GuiltHappiness 7107 7035Serenity 7051Sadness 198 032 051Fear 162 029AngerDisgust 128Contempt 075Shame 178 051Guilt 183 020

633

comparisons for each emotion in the profile for the six negative emotionsituations across the two studies For Study 1 the effect sizes for the urban andthe rural sample were combined To facilitate the reading of the table onlydifferences for which d was at least 020 (ie equivalent to a small effect) areshown In general effect sizes for Study 1 are larger than those for Study 2 Foremotional reactions the expected differences between men and women were ofmedium (gt 050) to large (gt 080) size whereas for self-perceptions the expecteddifferences between men and women were small to medium in size

The most stable sex difference across the two studies was found for sadnessboth as a core emotion in sadness vignettes and as a secondary emotion That isfor all negative emotions the general stereotype describes women as reactingwith more sadness and women also perceive themselves as reacting with moresadness andor report more sadness behaviours Further women are expected toreact with (and they self-report) more shame and guilt reactionsbehaviours inshame and guilt situations However for the other negative emotions (angerdisgust sadness and fear) men report higher levels of shame reactions or shamebehaviours (but not both) Finally fear reactions and behaviours are described asmore likely for women in general and women perceive themselves as reactingwith more fear in disgust sadness fear and guilt situations

Another very stable sex difference across studies regards happiness andserenity reactions for negative emotion vignettes Men consistently are bothexpected to react with and self-report more happiness reactions as well ashappiness behaviours for disgust fear and shame vignettes To a lesser degreethis pattern also emerges for sadness and guilt vignettes As mentioned in thediscussion of Study 1 this may reflect differences in the value structure betweenmen and women

In sum a comparison of effect sizes shows considerable consistency acrossthe two studies Specifically noteworthy is the very consistent finding for boththe stereotypical beliefs and the self-reports with regard to sadness reactionswhich are considered as more likely for women than for men for all negativeemotion situations studied

However a number of differences between the general stereotypes and theself-perceptions also emerged specifically with regard to shame reactionsWhereas women are generally believed to be more likely to react with shameto negative emotion events the self-reported likelihood for shame as aconcomitant emotion is higher for men for all situations except for guilt(given the general confusion regarding these states observed in Westerncultures this may be due to shame being a core rather than a concomitantemotion for guilt scenarios) Yet self-reported shame behaviours are morelikely for women than for men in sadness and disgust situations A possibleexplanation is that men are actively trying to not show shame reactionsmdashtoconform to the general stereotypemdashbut are aware that they nonetheless arelikely to feel shame in those situations

634 HESS ET AL

To conclude the general stereotype and self-perceptions of emotionalreactions and behaviours suggest that women react with more sadness to all typesof negative emotion events Further the stereotypes and the self-perceptions arein agreement on menrsquos greater likelihood to react with happiness and serenity to avariety of negative emotions In contrast differences between the generalstereotypes and self-perceptions emerge for shame reactions with men reportingin situations when shame is a secondary emotion a higher likelihood of shamereactions but not necessarily shame behaviours than do women

STUDY 3

The results from Study 2 suggest that the stereotypical beliefs regarding menrsquosand womenrsquos emotional reactions and behaviours in a variety of emotion-inducing situations converge with self-perceptions of menrsquos and womenrsquosemotional reactions and behaviours in those same situations This finding isconsistent with the notion that autobiographic statements that requireparticipants to summarise over a number of related experiences may be biasedby stereotypical expectations (see eg Feldman-Barrett et al 1998) This leadsto the question of whether a similar overlap can also be found for narratives ofsingle specific emotional events from the participantsrsquo past If stereotypesindeed influence the way emotional events are reconstructed in a narrative wewould expect to find that women report more sadness events and express moresadness overall as well as more intense target emotions for all but anger eventsConversely we would expect men to report more situations involving anger aswell as experiencing more happiness and serenity overall

However as Study 3 is based on personal narratives and not on standardisedvignettes such a finding could simply be due to the fact that the emotionantecedent events in a real-life setting differ for men and women To assess thispossibility we decided to measure the emotion antecedent events by means of anappraisal questionnaire that assesses the participantsrsquo perception of the emotionantecedent situation To the degree that perceptions of emotion antecedents aresimilar for men and women while reported emotional reactions differ we canconclude that observed sex differences are not due to differences in theperception of the event per se For example if womenrsquos tendency to report moresadness were due to a difference in the perception of the emotion antecedentsituation we would expect women to report more often that they did not feel thatthey could do anything to change the situation or that they had to adapt to thesituation (as sadness is generally associated with the notion of irrevocable loss)

Overview

For this study we translated and adapted a questionnaire reported by Scherer(1988) that consists of two parts The first part invites the participants todescribe an event during which they experienced an emotion The second part

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 635

asks specific questions regarding the appraisal process We added a section inwhich we asked participants to complete an emotion profile for the event Toavoid the possibility that men and women would relate narratives from widelydifferent types of situations we asked participants to describe an event related tofamily interactions This class of situations should be readily accessible to allparticipants and ensure that emotional events involving human interactionpartners were reported

Allowing participants to choose the type of emotional events they report hasseveral advantages Most importantly we can assess what type of emotionalevents men and women choose to report spontaneously It also permitsparticipants to choose a salient event for which they can recollect theinformation necessary to respond to the appraisal questions On the other handthis approach is unlikely to result in a well-balanced distribution of emotiontopics thus making it difficult or impossible to analyse the data separately fordifferent emotion themes Yet in the context of the present study we were onlyinterested in sex differences in reports and not in absolute levels of responsesStudies 1 and 2 suggest that sex differences are very stable across all negativeemotions We therefore decided to allow participants to choose the emotiontheme and analysed the data collapsed across all negative emotion themes

Method

Participants A total of 171 students 87 men and 84 women with a meanage of 1862 years participated in this study Most of the participants (147) wererecruited from an ethnically homogenous junior college in the larger Montrealurban area (Cegep Lionel-Groulx Ste-Therese Quebec Canada) and partici-pated in groups An additional 24 participants were recruited individually

Procedure The experimenter explained that the study concerned emotionalevents in peoplersquos lives Participants were informed of their right to discontinueparticipation at any time and for any reason The experimenter then distributedthe questionnaires and responded to questions regarding the procedure The tasktook between 10 and 30 minutes Most of this time difference can be attributedto the amount of detail provided in the event description that ranged from acouple of words (eg birth of my daughter) to well over a page

Dependent measures The questionnaire consisted of four parts The firstpart was an open-ended question asking the participants to describe any eventinvolving their family life that led them to experience an emotion Sadnessshame anger guilt joy fear and disgust were provided as examples ofemotions Participants were asked to give a detailed description of the situationincluding the events that led up to it their reactions and those of others presentIn addition they were asked to identify the people involved with respect to their

636 HESS ET AL

relationship with them (eg my partner my sister etc) as well as to identify themain emotion theme of the story This served to ensure that the participantsbased their answers to the following questions on a specific event and not on aclass of similar events

Emotion description The second part of the questionnaire consisted ofquestions regarding when the event happened for how long they felt theemotion and the intensity of the core emotion identified as the emotion theme ofthe story Participants were also asked to indicate whether they tried to hide orcontrol their feelings and to what degree This part also contained the emotionprofile used in Studies 1 and 2 Using this measure participants were asked toindicate to what percentage they had felt each of the nine emotions from theprofile

Appraisal questionnaire A series of questions regarding the appraisal processwere used to assess the emotion antecedent events These questions weretranslated from the questionnaire reported by Scherer (1988) Specificallyparticipants were asked to what degree they had expected the situation to occurhow pleasant or unpleasant they considered the event whether the event helpedor hindered them in achieving their aims to what degree they considered that thesituation or the event that caused the emotion was unjust or unfair whether theevent was caused by their own or by someone elsersquos behaviour to what degreethey considered that the behaviour that caused the event would be judged asimproper or immoral by their acquaintances how the event affected theirfeelings about themselves such as their self-esteem or self-confidence andfinally to what degree the event changed their relationships with the peopleinvolved (all on negative-positive 7-point bipolar scales)

In addition participants were given a list of 11 specific potential causes of theevent (caused it myself natural causes act of god etc) They also evaluatedtheir ability to act upon or to cope with the event and its consequences using ascale involving 5 options The last part of the questionnaire consisted ofquestions regarding the participantsrsquo sex their age and whether they werecurrently seeing someone in a love-based relationship and if so for how long

Results

Of the 171 reported emotion events 147 (74 reported by men and 73 reported bywomen) concerned negative emotional events Of these a total of 62 weresadness events 22 were anger events and 11 were guilt events The remainingevents were distributed over a large number of negative emotions

As expected the very low frequency of reports for specific emotion themesmade separate analyses of reports of these events unfeasible We thereforedecided to perform analyses on the data summed over all negative emotionthemes The 24 events with positive emotion themes were obviously excludedfrom these analyses

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 637

Do women report more sadness events and men more anger events Toaddress this question a chi-square test was performed on the frequency withwhich men and women labeled the reported event as a sad versus an anger eventIn line with the results of Studies 1 and 2 we found men to report more angerevents and women to report more sadness events Specifically 14 men and 8women reported anger events and 25 men and 37 women reported sad events w2

= 355 p = 06 d = 42Do women report more intense core emotions than men For the intensity of

the core emotion experienced during the event women reported significantlyhigher levels (M = 593 SD = 101) than men (M = 554 SD = 123) t(145) =222 p = 028 d = 37

Do women and men report different levels of negative emotions across theemotion profile Figure 2 presents the emotion profiles separately for men andwomen An inspection of the profiles shows that overall men report morehappinessserenity whereas women report higher levels of all other emotionsThe profiles are nonparallel F(8 137) = 5877 p lt 001 Post-hoc analysesrevealed a significant sex difference in self-reported sadness with womenreporting higher levels than men To compare the sex differences in the profiles

Figure 2 Emotion profile for menrsquos and womenrsquos self-reported emotional reactions to negativeemotion events (Study 3)

638 HESS ET AL

found in this study with those from Studies 1 and 2 effect sizes were calculatedUsing the same cut-off point as previously (small effect size d = 020) only twodifferences were found to be stable across the three studies Men report higherlevels of happiness for negative emotion events (d = 7022) and women reporthigher levels of sadness (d = 043) As the latter difference may be due to thehigher frequency of reported sadness events by women we also verified whetherwomen report higher levels of sadness when sadness events are excluded fromthe analysis An inspection of the means revealed a marginally significantdifference in the same direction M = 6472 SD = 3247 and M = 5108 SD =3684 for women and men respectively t(83) = 181 p = 074 d = 40

Are there differences in appraisal patterns between men and women Asmentioned earlier the reported differences in emotional reactions could be dueto differences in the perception of the emotion antecedent events Yet nodifferences in appraisal patterns were found suggesting that emotion antecedentevents were perceived similarly In addition despite the more frequent and moreintense reports of sadness women did not report different coping styles thanmen and did not seem to feel more helpless (38 men vs 34 women report thisreaction) In fact women more frequently report that they felt able to lsquolsquoinfluencethe situation positivelyrsquorsquo (19 women vs 9 men report this reaction though thedifference is not significant)

Discussion

Study 3 extended the study of emotion stereotypes and self-perceptions based onvignettes to narratives of emotional events that the participants had in factexperienced themselves The goal of the study was to investigate whether thefindings from Studies 1 and 2 generalise to such recollections of personal eventsThe results strongly suggest this to be the case Women again report higherlevels of sadness for negative emotion events They also report more sad eventsin general Men on the other hand report more anger events as well as morehappiness for negative emotion events as was found in both Studies 1 and 2 Yetno reported differences in appraisal or coping emerged This suggests that theobserved differences in emotional reactions are not due to a bias in the appraisalprocess nor to an inability to act upon the event

If emotion antecedents do not differ why are differences in emotionalreactions reported We suggest that such differences represent an influence ofthe general emotion stereotype on the narrative reconstruction of a personalevent This conclusion is based on the observation of a null effect and thus opento the critique that the present study lacked the power necessary to detect realdifferences in appraisal between men and women To assess this critique wecalculated the absolute mean effect size for the interval-scaled appraisalquestions to be d = 015 To achieve 80 power a sample of 1100 participantswould be needed These data underscore the very slim differences in appraisals

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 639

between men and women making it highly unlikely that the effects observed inthis study are mediated by a difference in appraisal and thus by a difference inthe perception of the underlying event

CONCLUSIONS

The present series of studies had the goal to assess general emotion stereotypesand their influence on self-perceptions of emotional reactions by men andwomen We wanted to both describe these stereotypes in more detail with regardnot only to the modal emotion for a specific event (such as sadness reactions to aloss) but also with regard to the secondary emotions present in these situationsFurther we wanted to assess to what degree such expectations for men andwomen in general are endorsed by individuals for themselves as well as whetherthey would be spontaneously reported when relating a personally experiencedevent

Two gender differences were found to be stable across all three experimentalparadigms Women are expected to be more likely to react with sadness in allnegative emotion situations they expect themselves to be more likely to reactwith sadness as well as to cry and to withdraw more and finally women reportmore sadness in personal events In contrast men are expected to react withmore happinessserenity during negative emotional situations they expectthemselves to react more frequently this way as well as to laugh and smile moreand to be more relaxed They also tend to report more happiness whendescribing negative personal events

Not all general emotion stereotypes were found in the self-perceptionsstudied in Studies 2 and 3 Specifically according to Study 1 women areexpected to be more likely to react with shame and guilt in all negative emotionsituations Yet women did not expect to do so for themselves in situations otherthan shame and guilt situations and in fact men reported to be more likely toreact with shame in a variety of situations Further men and women did notreport any differences with regard to experiences of shame and guilt during thepersonal events

Study 3 included an appraisal questionnaire to address the question whetherthe self-reported differences in emotionality between men and women are due todifferences in the appraisal of the emotion antecedent events or rather to theinfluence of the prevalent norms No differences in appraisals were detectedsuggesting that the self-reported differences may be due to the normative forcesof the general stereotype rather than to appraisal differences

It may be argued that the Study 3 is based on recollections of past events andthat self-reports of emotional experiences represent after the fact reconstructionsthat differ from the actually experienced emotions during the event (seeParkinson amp Manstead 1993) A related argument may be made for Study 2where participants had to estimate the likelihood of their emotional reactions to

640 HESS ET AL

hypothetical events (even though the latter were chosen to be common everydayevents) This may well be true Yet the question remains why did men andwomen reconstruct the events differently in terms of their emotional reactionsThe answer would then be that the prevalent emotion stereotype which islargely endorsed by the population studied influenced this reconstruction Yetas peoplesrsquo sense of self depends on their past histories this would imply thatreconstructions of emotional events in line with emotion stereotypes mayeventually lead individuals to conform more closely to these stereotypes as theybecome more and more part of their emotional history and eventually of theiremotional self

Manuscript received 30 May 1997Revised manuscript received 23 February 2000

REFERENCES

Adams S Kuebli J Boyle PA amp Fivush R (1995) Gender differences in parent-childconversations about past emotions A longitudinal investigation Sex Roles 33 309ndash323

Allen JG amp Haccoun DM (1976) Sex differences in emotionality A multidimensional approachHuman Relations 29 711ndash722

Averill JR (1997) The emotions An integrative approach In R Hogan JA Johnson amp SRBriggs (Eds) Handbook of personality psychology (pp 513ndash541) San Diego CA AcademicPress

Birnbaum DW (1983) Preschoolersrsquo stereotypes about sex differences in emotionality Areaffirmation Journal of Genetic Psychology 143 139ndash140

Briton NJ amp Hall JA (1995) Gender-based expectancies and observer judgements of smilingJournal of Nonverbal Behavior 19 49ndash65

Brody LR amp Hall JA (1993) Gender and emotion In M Lewis amp JM Haviland (Eds)Handbook of emotions (pp 447-460) New York Guilford Press

Crawford J Clippax S Onyx J Gault U amp Benton P (1992) Emotion and genderConstructing meaning from memory London Sage

Dunn J Bretherton I amp Munn P (1987) Conversations about feeling states between mothers andtheir children Developmental Psychology 23 132ndash139

Eagly AH amp Mladinic A (1989) Gender stereotypes and attitudes toward women and menPersonality and Social Psychology Bulletin 15 543ndash558

Ekman P amp Friesen W (1986) A new pan-cultural facial expression of emotion Motivation andEmotion 10 159ndash168

Feldman-Barrett L Robin L Pietromonaco PR amp Eysell KM (1998) Are women the moreemotional sex Evidence from emotional experiences in social context Cognition and Emotion12 555ndash578

Fernandez-Dols J-M amp Ruiz-Belda M-A (1995) Are smiles a sign of happiness Gold medalwinners at the Olympic Games Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 69 1113ndash1119

Fischer A (1993) Sex differences in emotionality Fact or stereotype Feminism and Psychology 3303ndash318

Fivush R (1989) Exploring differences in the emotional content of mother child conversationsabout the past Sex Roles 20 675ndash691

Frank MG amp Ekman P (1993) Not all smiles are created equal The differences betweenenjoyment and nonenjoymen t smiles [Special Issue Current issues in psychological humorresearch] Humor International Journal of Humor Research 6 9ndash26

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 641

Gallois C (1994) Group membership social rules and power A social psychologica l perspectiveon emotional communication Journal of Pragmatics 22 301ndash324

Hall JA (1984) Nonverbal sex differences Communication accuracy and expressive styleBaltimore MD Johns Hopkins University Press

Izard C (1972) Patterns of emotions A new analysis of anxiety and depression New YorkAcademic Press

Jussim L Milbourn M amp Nelson W (1991) Emotional openness Sex-role stereotypes and self-perceptions Representative Research in Social Psychology 19 35ndash52

Kirouac G amp Hess U (1999) Group membership and the decoding of nonverbal behavior In PPhilippot R Feldman amp E Coats (Eds) The social context of nonverbal behavior (pp 182ndash210) New York Cambridge University Press

Kring AM amp Gordon AH (1998) Sex differences in emotion Expression experience andphysiology Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74 686ndash703

LaFrance M amp Banaji M (1992) Toward a reconsideration of the gender-emotion relationship InMS Clark (Ed) Emotion and social behavior Review of personality and social psychology(Vol 14 pp 178ndash201) Newbury Park CA Sage

LaFrance M amp Hecht MA (1995) Why smiles generate leniency Personality and SocialPsychology Bulletin 21 207ndash214

Lazarus RS (1991) Emotion and adaptation Oxford UK Oxford University PressParkinson B amp Manstead ASR (1993) Making sense of emotion in stories and social life

Cognition and Emotion 7 295ndash323Plutchik R (1980) Emotion A psychoevolutionar y synthesis New York Harper amp RowRime B Mesquita B Philippot P amp Boca S (1991) Beyond the emotional event Six studies on

the social sharing of emotion Cognition and Emotion 5 435ndash465Scherer KR (1988) Appendix C Questionnaire used in the International Survey on Emotion

Antecedents and Reactions (ISEAR) In KR Scherer (Ed) Facets of emotion Recent researchHillsdale NJ Erlbaum

Sherman JW amp Bessenhoff GR (1999) Stereotypes as source monitoring cues On theinteraction between episodic and semantic memory Psychological Science 10 106ndash110

Stoppard JM amp Gruchy CD (1993) Gender context and expression of positive emotionPersonality and Social Psychology Bulletin 19 143ndash150

Tucker JS amp Riggio RE (1988) The role of social skills in encoding posed and spontaneousfacial expressions Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 12 87ndash97

Wallbott HG amp Scherer KR (1994) Cultural determinants in experiencing shame and guilt InJune Price Tangney amp Kurt W Fischer (Eds) Self conscious emotions The psychology of shameand guilt embarrasment and pride (pp 465ndash487) New York Guilford Press

642 HESS ET AL

Results and discussion

As noted earlier the goal of Study 2 was to assess to what degree the self-perceptions of the men and women who participated in this study overlap withthe general stereotypes found in Study 1 To accomplish this the emotionprofiles from Study 1 were compared with the self-reported emotional profilesand with the behavioural reaction profiles collected here

Self-described emotion profiles The means and standard deviations for thenine scales of the emotion profiles for male and female participants arepresented in Table 3 A comparison of these means with those of the profilesfrom Study 1 reveals substantial similarities between the emotional reactionsexpected for oneself and those expected for men and women in general

Behavioral reactions Table 3 shows the means and standard deviations forthe nine behavioural reaction profiles These profiles represent the participantsself-report of the likelihood that they would display these specific behaviours inthe situations described by the vignettes As the focus of this paper is on sex

TABLE 3Means and standard deviations for self-perceptions of emotional reactionsbehaviours

for men and women (Study 2)

Men Women

Situation Mean SD Mean SD

AngerHappiness 262 1224 006 054Laughget excited 790 1826 429 1168Serenity 262 827 135 532Smilerelaxcontemplate 865 2068 435 1185Sadness 2359 2390 4405 3151Cryisolate oneself 935 2083 1825 2250Fear 603 1589 486 1070Tremblefreeze 332 814 630 1155Anger 6268 2873 6076 2928Hitinsultcriticise 3540 3042 2654 2873Disgust 1175 2447 1094 1997Grimacevomit 194 553 286 854Contempt 1865 2505 2102 2543Starelook hard at 2065 2718 1156 2216Shame 286 827 802 1887Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 1044 2187 1038 1642Guilt 349 826 491 1582Justify oneselfapologise 2045 3072 1761 2663

(Continued)

626 HESS ET AL

TABLE 3(Continued)

Men Women

Situation Mean SD Mean SD

DisgustHappiness 611 1714 143 575Laughget excited 1989 2669 915 1825Serenity 611 1855 208 1159Smilerelaxcontemplate 1159t 2113 578 1482Sadness 516 1537 490 1531Cryisolate oneself 073 403 346 1352Fear 373t 1066 911 2018Tremblefreeze 476t 1154 1015 1977Anger 1359 2146 1437 2521Hitinsultcriticise 1214 2210 1186 2151Disgust 5086 3257 5881 3178Grimacevomit 1167 2121 1692 2236Contempt 1798 2226 1750 2706Starelook hard at 1991 2362 1686 2363Shame 1023 1972 1683 2738Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 645 1663 1169 2337Guilt 262 937 119 378Justify oneselfapologise 992 2511 744 1924

SadnessHappiness 317 1280 412 1594Laughget excited 123 789 128 114Serenity 887t 2017 318 1456Smilerelaxcontemplate 621 1848 346 1196Sadness 7690 2816 8251 2258Cryisolate oneself 6008 3131 6736 3059Fear 849t 1820 1546 2637Tremblefreeze 1595 2763 1135 2068Anger 1825 2641 2261 2919Hitinsultcriticise 532 1399 641 1517Disgust 651t 2015 176 940Grimacevomit 790 2017 353 1318Contempt 659 2125 332 1121Starelook hard at 000 000 045 397Shame 214 1050 141 711Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 2008 2916 724 1680Guilt 1524 2494 2141 2985Justify oneselfapologise 315 1065 391 1478

FearHappiness 317 1487 006 054Laughget excited 203 1054 058 361Serenity 587 1698 082 327

(Continued overleaf)

627

TABLE 3(Continued)

Men Women

Situation Mean SD Mean SD

Smilerelaxcontemplate 1048 2243 182 666Sadness 2333 3051 2929 3588Cryisolate oneself 1306 2536 3022 3582Fear 5111 3207 7535 2715Tremblefreeze 2008 2565 3378 3378Anger 2468 3297 1954 2949Hitinsultcriticise 1222 2098 446 1410Disgust 787 1808 1006 2206Grimacevomit 429 1270 365 1115Contempt 1192 2216 1141 2078Starelook hard at 677 1822 391 1405Shame 143 470 200 615Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 1606 2579 1000 2117Guilt 794 2199 369 995Justify oneselfapologise 282 1263 276 1319

ShameHappiness 452 1596 144 1039Laughget excited 1825 2905 1387 1990Serenity 444 1492 182 1028Smilerelaxcontemplate 1206t 2333 623 1262Sadness 1151 2121 2077 2361Cryisolate oneself 334 877 426 1107Fear 1246 2431 1135 1700Tremblefreeze 776 1569 894 1491Anger 1262 2259 1432 2408Hitinsultcriticise 565 1478 314 1140Disgust 206 966 347 1244Grimacevomit 202 590 231 1086Contempt 730 1532 811 1880Starelook hard at 347 833 304 1160Shame 4819 3534 5968 2948Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 2563 2974 2885 2908Guilt 3095 3442 4788 3282Justify oneselfapologise 4379 3144 4256 3074

GuiltHappiness 1024 2432 355 1189Laughget excited 734 2259 584 1761Serenity 262 1008 223 771Smilerelaxcontemplate 645 1692 416 1409Sadness 2003t 2705 2971 3390Cryisolate oneself 960 1992 2273 2979Fear 1778 2667 2653 3305

(Continued)

628

differences we will not discuss these data in detail However two things arenoteworthy First both men and women report lower probabilities that theywould react with a certain behaviour for example lsquolsquoto laughto get excitedrsquorsquothan with the emotion that corresponds to the behaviour (happiness) Thisfinding is not unexpected as individuals do not always express their emotionsoutwardly or may have developed idiosyncratic means of expressing certainemotions Second the profile data for the behaviours resemble strongly theemotional reactions reported For example for anger the highest means arefound for to hitto insultto criticise for to cryto isolate one self and for to stare

TABLE 3(Continued)

Men Women

Situation Mean SD Mean SD

Tremblefreeze 1206 2212 1227 2024Anger 1762 2980 1926 2950Hitinsultcriticise 129 543 221 720Disgust 1248 2569 1152 2402Grimacevomit 581 1642 351 1385Contempt 1603 2857 1464 2611Starelook hard at 129 495 136 485Shame 2667 3227 5375 3467Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 1952 2472 1769 2333Guilt 5071 3885 5753 3372Justify oneselfapologise 4484 3581 4286 3608

HappinessHappiness 8913 1981 9106 1471Laughget excited 5763 3420 6069 3283Serenity 2738t 3650 3906 3797Smilerelaxcontemplate 5451 3445 4647 3432Sadness 127 946 020 123Cryisolate oneself 040 318 029 141Fear 103 372 206 680Tremblefreeze 419t 1313 090 057Anger 032 252 000 000Hitinsultcriticise 000 000 013 114Disgust 048 378 000 000Grimacevomit 000 000 000 000Contempt 081 522 000 000Starelook hard at 355 1392 147 388Shame 111 764 000 000Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 718 1905 687 1859Guilt 270 1526 000 000Justify oneselfapologise 355 1535 090 340

Note Significant differences between men and women tp lt 1 p lt 05 p lt 01 p lt 001

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 629

to look hard at which correspond to anger sadness and contempt reactionsrespectively

However a number of differences between these two types of profiles canalso be observed For example for the emotional reaction profiles for anger andsadness the second highest mean is found for guilt whereas for the behaviouralreaction profiles for these emotions the second highest mean is found for shamebehaviours (to withdrawto lower onersquos headto blush) This findings may be dueto the general confusion between shame and guilt that has been observed forWestern cultures (see eg Wallbott amp Scherer 1994)

Sex differences To assess whether male and female participants differedwith regard to their expected emotional reactions and behaviours in the differentemotion eliciting situations profile analyses were conducted on the ratings foreach emotion situation All analyses and post-hoc tests were conducted at analpha level of 05 The results are shown in Table 4

TABLE 4Results of profile analyses on self-reported likelihood

of emotional reactionsbehaviours for men andwomen (Study 2)

Vignettes F df p

AngerReactions 295 8116 005Behaviours 183 8113 079

DisgustReactions 169 8115 107Behaviours 173 8116 099

FearReactions 330 8116 002Behaviours 390 8116 001

SadnessReactions 207 8116 044Behaviours 170 8115 105

GuiltReactions 186 8117 071Behaviours 130 8115 251

ShameReactions 215 8116 037Behaviours 70 8116 689

HappinessReactions 106 8116 397Behaviours 109 8116 376

630 HESS ET AL

Emotional reactions For all emotion situations except disgust andhappiness the emotional reactions profiles were nonparallel or marginallynonparallel (see Table 4) For the nonparallel profiles post-hoc tests revealedthat a similar pattern of sex differences emerged across the different emotionthemes For happiness and serenity there were either no significant differencesbetween men and women or men reported experiencing these emotions with ahigher probability than did women Conversely for sadness fear shame andguilt there were either no significant sex differences or women reported feelingthese emotions with a higher probability than did men For anger disgust andcontempt reactions no significant differences emerged

Emotional behaviour profiles Only the fear profile was significantlynonparallel (different) for men and women The profiles for anger and disgustwere marginally nonparallel and the remaining profiles were all parallel andcoincident Thus fewer significant differences between menrsquos and womenrsquosexpected behaviours in the situations described by the vignettes were found thanwas the case for the expected emotional reactions in Studies 1 and 2 Yet it isimportant to note that the probabilities reported for the behavioural profiles werelower overall and it is thus possible that this lack of differences is due to a lackof sensitivity of the measure

As postulated based on previous research (eg Crawford Clippax OnyxGault amp Benton 1992) as well as on the emotional reactions profile womenreport a higher probability of either crying or isolating oneself in an angersituation than do men Conversely and in accordance with both the literature onanger expression (see earlier) and the results from the emotional reactionsprofile men report it more likely to hitto insultto criticise than women thoughthis difference is not significant In addition they report that they aresignificantly more likely to stareto look hard (contempt) than do women abehaviour that could also be interpreted as aggressive when shown in responseto an insult

As regards the disgust situations men report that they are more likely tolaughto get excited This sex difference matches the finding for the emotionalreactions profile but was not found in Study 1 Finally for the fear situation menreport that they are more likely to hitto insultto criticise as well as to smiletorelaxto contemplate (serenity) than do women The emotional reactions profilefor fear from this study shows that men report a higher probability of reactingwith serenity but not with anger than do women As these behaviourscorrespond to a macho or cool demeanour in a threatening situation they fit thegeneral stereotype of masculine behaviour Conversely women report to bemore likely to trembleto freeze as well as to cryto isolate one self in fearsituations

In sum although many fewer sex differences reached significance whencomparing self-reported expected behaviours for men and women the pattern of

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 631

results is largely congruent with previous findings Specifically women reporteda higher probability of showing behaviours congruent with sadness and fear thandid men whereas men reported higher probabilities for anger and serenebehaviours In addition men reported a higher probability of showing acontempt behaviour in an anger situation yet the relevant behaviour (to staretolook hard) could be interpreted as aggressive in that context

How congruent are the findings fromStudies 1 and 2

As mentioned earlier not all significant differences found in Study 1 for theexpected reactions for men and women in general were also found for self-reports of expected reactions by men and women for themselves Yet as theresults for the two studies are based on different degrees of freedomsignificance levels cannot be directly compared To assess whether stereotypicaland self-reported sex differences were of similar magnitude we computed theeffect sizes for both studies Table 5 shows Cohenrsquos d for the post-hoc

TABLE 5Cohenrsquos d for sex differences in Studies 1 and 2

Study 1 Study 2

SituationEmotionalreactions

Emotionalreactions

Emotionalbehaviours

AngerHappiness 7023Serenity 7025Sadness 203 073 041Fear 123 030Anger 7055 7030Disgust 068Contempt 7026Shame 117 7035Guilt 129

DisgustHappiness 7032 7037 7047Serenity 7045 7026 7021Sadness 095 027Fear 189 033 033AngerDisgust 160 024 024Contempt 050Shame 062 7028 026Guilt 062 020

(Continued)

632 HESS ET AL

TABLE 5(Continued)

Study 1 Study 2

SituationEmotionalreactions

Emotionalreactions

Emotionalbehaviours

SadnessHappiness 7053Serenity 7032Sadness 184 022 024Fear 171 031Anger 7065 042Disgust 7030 7025Contempt 021Shame 020 7046 054Guilt 176 022 7033

FearHappiness 7021 7030Serenity 7026 7041 7052Sadness 189 055Fear 221 082 046Anger 7084 7043Disgust 067ContemptShame 049 7026Guilt 172 7025

ShameHappiness 7045 7023Serenity 7027 7020 7031Sadness 175 041Fear 128Anger 7069Disgust 065Contempt 054Shame 154 035Guilt 153 050

GuiltHappiness 7107 7035Serenity 7051Sadness 198 032 051Fear 162 029AngerDisgust 128Contempt 075Shame 178 051Guilt 183 020

633

comparisons for each emotion in the profile for the six negative emotionsituations across the two studies For Study 1 the effect sizes for the urban andthe rural sample were combined To facilitate the reading of the table onlydifferences for which d was at least 020 (ie equivalent to a small effect) areshown In general effect sizes for Study 1 are larger than those for Study 2 Foremotional reactions the expected differences between men and women were ofmedium (gt 050) to large (gt 080) size whereas for self-perceptions the expecteddifferences between men and women were small to medium in size

The most stable sex difference across the two studies was found for sadnessboth as a core emotion in sadness vignettes and as a secondary emotion That isfor all negative emotions the general stereotype describes women as reactingwith more sadness and women also perceive themselves as reacting with moresadness andor report more sadness behaviours Further women are expected toreact with (and they self-report) more shame and guilt reactionsbehaviours inshame and guilt situations However for the other negative emotions (angerdisgust sadness and fear) men report higher levels of shame reactions or shamebehaviours (but not both) Finally fear reactions and behaviours are described asmore likely for women in general and women perceive themselves as reactingwith more fear in disgust sadness fear and guilt situations

Another very stable sex difference across studies regards happiness andserenity reactions for negative emotion vignettes Men consistently are bothexpected to react with and self-report more happiness reactions as well ashappiness behaviours for disgust fear and shame vignettes To a lesser degreethis pattern also emerges for sadness and guilt vignettes As mentioned in thediscussion of Study 1 this may reflect differences in the value structure betweenmen and women

In sum a comparison of effect sizes shows considerable consistency acrossthe two studies Specifically noteworthy is the very consistent finding for boththe stereotypical beliefs and the self-reports with regard to sadness reactionswhich are considered as more likely for women than for men for all negativeemotion situations studied

However a number of differences between the general stereotypes and theself-perceptions also emerged specifically with regard to shame reactionsWhereas women are generally believed to be more likely to react with shameto negative emotion events the self-reported likelihood for shame as aconcomitant emotion is higher for men for all situations except for guilt(given the general confusion regarding these states observed in Westerncultures this may be due to shame being a core rather than a concomitantemotion for guilt scenarios) Yet self-reported shame behaviours are morelikely for women than for men in sadness and disgust situations A possibleexplanation is that men are actively trying to not show shame reactionsmdashtoconform to the general stereotypemdashbut are aware that they nonetheless arelikely to feel shame in those situations

634 HESS ET AL

To conclude the general stereotype and self-perceptions of emotionalreactions and behaviours suggest that women react with more sadness to all typesof negative emotion events Further the stereotypes and the self-perceptions arein agreement on menrsquos greater likelihood to react with happiness and serenity to avariety of negative emotions In contrast differences between the generalstereotypes and self-perceptions emerge for shame reactions with men reportingin situations when shame is a secondary emotion a higher likelihood of shamereactions but not necessarily shame behaviours than do women

STUDY 3

The results from Study 2 suggest that the stereotypical beliefs regarding menrsquosand womenrsquos emotional reactions and behaviours in a variety of emotion-inducing situations converge with self-perceptions of menrsquos and womenrsquosemotional reactions and behaviours in those same situations This finding isconsistent with the notion that autobiographic statements that requireparticipants to summarise over a number of related experiences may be biasedby stereotypical expectations (see eg Feldman-Barrett et al 1998) This leadsto the question of whether a similar overlap can also be found for narratives ofsingle specific emotional events from the participantsrsquo past If stereotypesindeed influence the way emotional events are reconstructed in a narrative wewould expect to find that women report more sadness events and express moresadness overall as well as more intense target emotions for all but anger eventsConversely we would expect men to report more situations involving anger aswell as experiencing more happiness and serenity overall

However as Study 3 is based on personal narratives and not on standardisedvignettes such a finding could simply be due to the fact that the emotionantecedent events in a real-life setting differ for men and women To assess thispossibility we decided to measure the emotion antecedent events by means of anappraisal questionnaire that assesses the participantsrsquo perception of the emotionantecedent situation To the degree that perceptions of emotion antecedents aresimilar for men and women while reported emotional reactions differ we canconclude that observed sex differences are not due to differences in theperception of the event per se For example if womenrsquos tendency to report moresadness were due to a difference in the perception of the emotion antecedentsituation we would expect women to report more often that they did not feel thatthey could do anything to change the situation or that they had to adapt to thesituation (as sadness is generally associated with the notion of irrevocable loss)

Overview

For this study we translated and adapted a questionnaire reported by Scherer(1988) that consists of two parts The first part invites the participants todescribe an event during which they experienced an emotion The second part

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 635

asks specific questions regarding the appraisal process We added a section inwhich we asked participants to complete an emotion profile for the event Toavoid the possibility that men and women would relate narratives from widelydifferent types of situations we asked participants to describe an event related tofamily interactions This class of situations should be readily accessible to allparticipants and ensure that emotional events involving human interactionpartners were reported

Allowing participants to choose the type of emotional events they report hasseveral advantages Most importantly we can assess what type of emotionalevents men and women choose to report spontaneously It also permitsparticipants to choose a salient event for which they can recollect theinformation necessary to respond to the appraisal questions On the other handthis approach is unlikely to result in a well-balanced distribution of emotiontopics thus making it difficult or impossible to analyse the data separately fordifferent emotion themes Yet in the context of the present study we were onlyinterested in sex differences in reports and not in absolute levels of responsesStudies 1 and 2 suggest that sex differences are very stable across all negativeemotions We therefore decided to allow participants to choose the emotiontheme and analysed the data collapsed across all negative emotion themes

Method

Participants A total of 171 students 87 men and 84 women with a meanage of 1862 years participated in this study Most of the participants (147) wererecruited from an ethnically homogenous junior college in the larger Montrealurban area (Cegep Lionel-Groulx Ste-Therese Quebec Canada) and partici-pated in groups An additional 24 participants were recruited individually

Procedure The experimenter explained that the study concerned emotionalevents in peoplersquos lives Participants were informed of their right to discontinueparticipation at any time and for any reason The experimenter then distributedthe questionnaires and responded to questions regarding the procedure The tasktook between 10 and 30 minutes Most of this time difference can be attributedto the amount of detail provided in the event description that ranged from acouple of words (eg birth of my daughter) to well over a page

Dependent measures The questionnaire consisted of four parts The firstpart was an open-ended question asking the participants to describe any eventinvolving their family life that led them to experience an emotion Sadnessshame anger guilt joy fear and disgust were provided as examples ofemotions Participants were asked to give a detailed description of the situationincluding the events that led up to it their reactions and those of others presentIn addition they were asked to identify the people involved with respect to their

636 HESS ET AL

relationship with them (eg my partner my sister etc) as well as to identify themain emotion theme of the story This served to ensure that the participantsbased their answers to the following questions on a specific event and not on aclass of similar events

Emotion description The second part of the questionnaire consisted ofquestions regarding when the event happened for how long they felt theemotion and the intensity of the core emotion identified as the emotion theme ofthe story Participants were also asked to indicate whether they tried to hide orcontrol their feelings and to what degree This part also contained the emotionprofile used in Studies 1 and 2 Using this measure participants were asked toindicate to what percentage they had felt each of the nine emotions from theprofile

Appraisal questionnaire A series of questions regarding the appraisal processwere used to assess the emotion antecedent events These questions weretranslated from the questionnaire reported by Scherer (1988) Specificallyparticipants were asked to what degree they had expected the situation to occurhow pleasant or unpleasant they considered the event whether the event helpedor hindered them in achieving their aims to what degree they considered that thesituation or the event that caused the emotion was unjust or unfair whether theevent was caused by their own or by someone elsersquos behaviour to what degreethey considered that the behaviour that caused the event would be judged asimproper or immoral by their acquaintances how the event affected theirfeelings about themselves such as their self-esteem or self-confidence andfinally to what degree the event changed their relationships with the peopleinvolved (all on negative-positive 7-point bipolar scales)

In addition participants were given a list of 11 specific potential causes of theevent (caused it myself natural causes act of god etc) They also evaluatedtheir ability to act upon or to cope with the event and its consequences using ascale involving 5 options The last part of the questionnaire consisted ofquestions regarding the participantsrsquo sex their age and whether they werecurrently seeing someone in a love-based relationship and if so for how long

Results

Of the 171 reported emotion events 147 (74 reported by men and 73 reported bywomen) concerned negative emotional events Of these a total of 62 weresadness events 22 were anger events and 11 were guilt events The remainingevents were distributed over a large number of negative emotions

As expected the very low frequency of reports for specific emotion themesmade separate analyses of reports of these events unfeasible We thereforedecided to perform analyses on the data summed over all negative emotionthemes The 24 events with positive emotion themes were obviously excludedfrom these analyses

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 637

Do women report more sadness events and men more anger events Toaddress this question a chi-square test was performed on the frequency withwhich men and women labeled the reported event as a sad versus an anger eventIn line with the results of Studies 1 and 2 we found men to report more angerevents and women to report more sadness events Specifically 14 men and 8women reported anger events and 25 men and 37 women reported sad events w2

= 355 p = 06 d = 42Do women report more intense core emotions than men For the intensity of

the core emotion experienced during the event women reported significantlyhigher levels (M = 593 SD = 101) than men (M = 554 SD = 123) t(145) =222 p = 028 d = 37

Do women and men report different levels of negative emotions across theemotion profile Figure 2 presents the emotion profiles separately for men andwomen An inspection of the profiles shows that overall men report morehappinessserenity whereas women report higher levels of all other emotionsThe profiles are nonparallel F(8 137) = 5877 p lt 001 Post-hoc analysesrevealed a significant sex difference in self-reported sadness with womenreporting higher levels than men To compare the sex differences in the profiles

Figure 2 Emotion profile for menrsquos and womenrsquos self-reported emotional reactions to negativeemotion events (Study 3)

638 HESS ET AL

found in this study with those from Studies 1 and 2 effect sizes were calculatedUsing the same cut-off point as previously (small effect size d = 020) only twodifferences were found to be stable across the three studies Men report higherlevels of happiness for negative emotion events (d = 7022) and women reporthigher levels of sadness (d = 043) As the latter difference may be due to thehigher frequency of reported sadness events by women we also verified whetherwomen report higher levels of sadness when sadness events are excluded fromthe analysis An inspection of the means revealed a marginally significantdifference in the same direction M = 6472 SD = 3247 and M = 5108 SD =3684 for women and men respectively t(83) = 181 p = 074 d = 40

Are there differences in appraisal patterns between men and women Asmentioned earlier the reported differences in emotional reactions could be dueto differences in the perception of the emotion antecedent events Yet nodifferences in appraisal patterns were found suggesting that emotion antecedentevents were perceived similarly In addition despite the more frequent and moreintense reports of sadness women did not report different coping styles thanmen and did not seem to feel more helpless (38 men vs 34 women report thisreaction) In fact women more frequently report that they felt able to lsquolsquoinfluencethe situation positivelyrsquorsquo (19 women vs 9 men report this reaction though thedifference is not significant)

Discussion

Study 3 extended the study of emotion stereotypes and self-perceptions based onvignettes to narratives of emotional events that the participants had in factexperienced themselves The goal of the study was to investigate whether thefindings from Studies 1 and 2 generalise to such recollections of personal eventsThe results strongly suggest this to be the case Women again report higherlevels of sadness for negative emotion events They also report more sad eventsin general Men on the other hand report more anger events as well as morehappiness for negative emotion events as was found in both Studies 1 and 2 Yetno reported differences in appraisal or coping emerged This suggests that theobserved differences in emotional reactions are not due to a bias in the appraisalprocess nor to an inability to act upon the event

If emotion antecedents do not differ why are differences in emotionalreactions reported We suggest that such differences represent an influence ofthe general emotion stereotype on the narrative reconstruction of a personalevent This conclusion is based on the observation of a null effect and thus opento the critique that the present study lacked the power necessary to detect realdifferences in appraisal between men and women To assess this critique wecalculated the absolute mean effect size for the interval-scaled appraisalquestions to be d = 015 To achieve 80 power a sample of 1100 participantswould be needed These data underscore the very slim differences in appraisals

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 639

between men and women making it highly unlikely that the effects observed inthis study are mediated by a difference in appraisal and thus by a difference inthe perception of the underlying event

CONCLUSIONS

The present series of studies had the goal to assess general emotion stereotypesand their influence on self-perceptions of emotional reactions by men andwomen We wanted to both describe these stereotypes in more detail with regardnot only to the modal emotion for a specific event (such as sadness reactions to aloss) but also with regard to the secondary emotions present in these situationsFurther we wanted to assess to what degree such expectations for men andwomen in general are endorsed by individuals for themselves as well as whetherthey would be spontaneously reported when relating a personally experiencedevent

Two gender differences were found to be stable across all three experimentalparadigms Women are expected to be more likely to react with sadness in allnegative emotion situations they expect themselves to be more likely to reactwith sadness as well as to cry and to withdraw more and finally women reportmore sadness in personal events In contrast men are expected to react withmore happinessserenity during negative emotional situations they expectthemselves to react more frequently this way as well as to laugh and smile moreand to be more relaxed They also tend to report more happiness whendescribing negative personal events

Not all general emotion stereotypes were found in the self-perceptionsstudied in Studies 2 and 3 Specifically according to Study 1 women areexpected to be more likely to react with shame and guilt in all negative emotionsituations Yet women did not expect to do so for themselves in situations otherthan shame and guilt situations and in fact men reported to be more likely toreact with shame in a variety of situations Further men and women did notreport any differences with regard to experiences of shame and guilt during thepersonal events

Study 3 included an appraisal questionnaire to address the question whetherthe self-reported differences in emotionality between men and women are due todifferences in the appraisal of the emotion antecedent events or rather to theinfluence of the prevalent norms No differences in appraisals were detectedsuggesting that the self-reported differences may be due to the normative forcesof the general stereotype rather than to appraisal differences

It may be argued that the Study 3 is based on recollections of past events andthat self-reports of emotional experiences represent after the fact reconstructionsthat differ from the actually experienced emotions during the event (seeParkinson amp Manstead 1993) A related argument may be made for Study 2where participants had to estimate the likelihood of their emotional reactions to

640 HESS ET AL

hypothetical events (even though the latter were chosen to be common everydayevents) This may well be true Yet the question remains why did men andwomen reconstruct the events differently in terms of their emotional reactionsThe answer would then be that the prevalent emotion stereotype which islargely endorsed by the population studied influenced this reconstruction Yetas peoplesrsquo sense of self depends on their past histories this would imply thatreconstructions of emotional events in line with emotion stereotypes mayeventually lead individuals to conform more closely to these stereotypes as theybecome more and more part of their emotional history and eventually of theiremotional self

Manuscript received 30 May 1997Revised manuscript received 23 February 2000

REFERENCES

Adams S Kuebli J Boyle PA amp Fivush R (1995) Gender differences in parent-childconversations about past emotions A longitudinal investigation Sex Roles 33 309ndash323

Allen JG amp Haccoun DM (1976) Sex differences in emotionality A multidimensional approachHuman Relations 29 711ndash722

Averill JR (1997) The emotions An integrative approach In R Hogan JA Johnson amp SRBriggs (Eds) Handbook of personality psychology (pp 513ndash541) San Diego CA AcademicPress

Birnbaum DW (1983) Preschoolersrsquo stereotypes about sex differences in emotionality Areaffirmation Journal of Genetic Psychology 143 139ndash140

Briton NJ amp Hall JA (1995) Gender-based expectancies and observer judgements of smilingJournal of Nonverbal Behavior 19 49ndash65

Brody LR amp Hall JA (1993) Gender and emotion In M Lewis amp JM Haviland (Eds)Handbook of emotions (pp 447-460) New York Guilford Press

Crawford J Clippax S Onyx J Gault U amp Benton P (1992) Emotion and genderConstructing meaning from memory London Sage

Dunn J Bretherton I amp Munn P (1987) Conversations about feeling states between mothers andtheir children Developmental Psychology 23 132ndash139

Eagly AH amp Mladinic A (1989) Gender stereotypes and attitudes toward women and menPersonality and Social Psychology Bulletin 15 543ndash558

Ekman P amp Friesen W (1986) A new pan-cultural facial expression of emotion Motivation andEmotion 10 159ndash168

Feldman-Barrett L Robin L Pietromonaco PR amp Eysell KM (1998) Are women the moreemotional sex Evidence from emotional experiences in social context Cognition and Emotion12 555ndash578

Fernandez-Dols J-M amp Ruiz-Belda M-A (1995) Are smiles a sign of happiness Gold medalwinners at the Olympic Games Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 69 1113ndash1119

Fischer A (1993) Sex differences in emotionality Fact or stereotype Feminism and Psychology 3303ndash318

Fivush R (1989) Exploring differences in the emotional content of mother child conversationsabout the past Sex Roles 20 675ndash691

Frank MG amp Ekman P (1993) Not all smiles are created equal The differences betweenenjoyment and nonenjoymen t smiles [Special Issue Current issues in psychological humorresearch] Humor International Journal of Humor Research 6 9ndash26

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 641

Gallois C (1994) Group membership social rules and power A social psychologica l perspectiveon emotional communication Journal of Pragmatics 22 301ndash324

Hall JA (1984) Nonverbal sex differences Communication accuracy and expressive styleBaltimore MD Johns Hopkins University Press

Izard C (1972) Patterns of emotions A new analysis of anxiety and depression New YorkAcademic Press

Jussim L Milbourn M amp Nelson W (1991) Emotional openness Sex-role stereotypes and self-perceptions Representative Research in Social Psychology 19 35ndash52

Kirouac G amp Hess U (1999) Group membership and the decoding of nonverbal behavior In PPhilippot R Feldman amp E Coats (Eds) The social context of nonverbal behavior (pp 182ndash210) New York Cambridge University Press

Kring AM amp Gordon AH (1998) Sex differences in emotion Expression experience andphysiology Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74 686ndash703

LaFrance M amp Banaji M (1992) Toward a reconsideration of the gender-emotion relationship InMS Clark (Ed) Emotion and social behavior Review of personality and social psychology(Vol 14 pp 178ndash201) Newbury Park CA Sage

LaFrance M amp Hecht MA (1995) Why smiles generate leniency Personality and SocialPsychology Bulletin 21 207ndash214

Lazarus RS (1991) Emotion and adaptation Oxford UK Oxford University PressParkinson B amp Manstead ASR (1993) Making sense of emotion in stories and social life

Cognition and Emotion 7 295ndash323Plutchik R (1980) Emotion A psychoevolutionar y synthesis New York Harper amp RowRime B Mesquita B Philippot P amp Boca S (1991) Beyond the emotional event Six studies on

the social sharing of emotion Cognition and Emotion 5 435ndash465Scherer KR (1988) Appendix C Questionnaire used in the International Survey on Emotion

Antecedents and Reactions (ISEAR) In KR Scherer (Ed) Facets of emotion Recent researchHillsdale NJ Erlbaum

Sherman JW amp Bessenhoff GR (1999) Stereotypes as source monitoring cues On theinteraction between episodic and semantic memory Psychological Science 10 106ndash110

Stoppard JM amp Gruchy CD (1993) Gender context and expression of positive emotionPersonality and Social Psychology Bulletin 19 143ndash150

Tucker JS amp Riggio RE (1988) The role of social skills in encoding posed and spontaneousfacial expressions Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 12 87ndash97

Wallbott HG amp Scherer KR (1994) Cultural determinants in experiencing shame and guilt InJune Price Tangney amp Kurt W Fischer (Eds) Self conscious emotions The psychology of shameand guilt embarrasment and pride (pp 465ndash487) New York Guilford Press

642 HESS ET AL

TABLE 3(Continued)

Men Women

Situation Mean SD Mean SD

DisgustHappiness 611 1714 143 575Laughget excited 1989 2669 915 1825Serenity 611 1855 208 1159Smilerelaxcontemplate 1159t 2113 578 1482Sadness 516 1537 490 1531Cryisolate oneself 073 403 346 1352Fear 373t 1066 911 2018Tremblefreeze 476t 1154 1015 1977Anger 1359 2146 1437 2521Hitinsultcriticise 1214 2210 1186 2151Disgust 5086 3257 5881 3178Grimacevomit 1167 2121 1692 2236Contempt 1798 2226 1750 2706Starelook hard at 1991 2362 1686 2363Shame 1023 1972 1683 2738Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 645 1663 1169 2337Guilt 262 937 119 378Justify oneselfapologise 992 2511 744 1924

SadnessHappiness 317 1280 412 1594Laughget excited 123 789 128 114Serenity 887t 2017 318 1456Smilerelaxcontemplate 621 1848 346 1196Sadness 7690 2816 8251 2258Cryisolate oneself 6008 3131 6736 3059Fear 849t 1820 1546 2637Tremblefreeze 1595 2763 1135 2068Anger 1825 2641 2261 2919Hitinsultcriticise 532 1399 641 1517Disgust 651t 2015 176 940Grimacevomit 790 2017 353 1318Contempt 659 2125 332 1121Starelook hard at 000 000 045 397Shame 214 1050 141 711Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 2008 2916 724 1680Guilt 1524 2494 2141 2985Justify oneselfapologise 315 1065 391 1478

FearHappiness 317 1487 006 054Laughget excited 203 1054 058 361Serenity 587 1698 082 327

(Continued overleaf)

627

TABLE 3(Continued)

Men Women

Situation Mean SD Mean SD

Smilerelaxcontemplate 1048 2243 182 666Sadness 2333 3051 2929 3588Cryisolate oneself 1306 2536 3022 3582Fear 5111 3207 7535 2715Tremblefreeze 2008 2565 3378 3378Anger 2468 3297 1954 2949Hitinsultcriticise 1222 2098 446 1410Disgust 787 1808 1006 2206Grimacevomit 429 1270 365 1115Contempt 1192 2216 1141 2078Starelook hard at 677 1822 391 1405Shame 143 470 200 615Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 1606 2579 1000 2117Guilt 794 2199 369 995Justify oneselfapologise 282 1263 276 1319

ShameHappiness 452 1596 144 1039Laughget excited 1825 2905 1387 1990Serenity 444 1492 182 1028Smilerelaxcontemplate 1206t 2333 623 1262Sadness 1151 2121 2077 2361Cryisolate oneself 334 877 426 1107Fear 1246 2431 1135 1700Tremblefreeze 776 1569 894 1491Anger 1262 2259 1432 2408Hitinsultcriticise 565 1478 314 1140Disgust 206 966 347 1244Grimacevomit 202 590 231 1086Contempt 730 1532 811 1880Starelook hard at 347 833 304 1160Shame 4819 3534 5968 2948Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 2563 2974 2885 2908Guilt 3095 3442 4788 3282Justify oneselfapologise 4379 3144 4256 3074

GuiltHappiness 1024 2432 355 1189Laughget excited 734 2259 584 1761Serenity 262 1008 223 771Smilerelaxcontemplate 645 1692 416 1409Sadness 2003t 2705 2971 3390Cryisolate oneself 960 1992 2273 2979Fear 1778 2667 2653 3305

(Continued)

628

differences we will not discuss these data in detail However two things arenoteworthy First both men and women report lower probabilities that theywould react with a certain behaviour for example lsquolsquoto laughto get excitedrsquorsquothan with the emotion that corresponds to the behaviour (happiness) Thisfinding is not unexpected as individuals do not always express their emotionsoutwardly or may have developed idiosyncratic means of expressing certainemotions Second the profile data for the behaviours resemble strongly theemotional reactions reported For example for anger the highest means arefound for to hitto insultto criticise for to cryto isolate one self and for to stare

TABLE 3(Continued)

Men Women

Situation Mean SD Mean SD

Tremblefreeze 1206 2212 1227 2024Anger 1762 2980 1926 2950Hitinsultcriticise 129 543 221 720Disgust 1248 2569 1152 2402Grimacevomit 581 1642 351 1385Contempt 1603 2857 1464 2611Starelook hard at 129 495 136 485Shame 2667 3227 5375 3467Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 1952 2472 1769 2333Guilt 5071 3885 5753 3372Justify oneselfapologise 4484 3581 4286 3608

HappinessHappiness 8913 1981 9106 1471Laughget excited 5763 3420 6069 3283Serenity 2738t 3650 3906 3797Smilerelaxcontemplate 5451 3445 4647 3432Sadness 127 946 020 123Cryisolate oneself 040 318 029 141Fear 103 372 206 680Tremblefreeze 419t 1313 090 057Anger 032 252 000 000Hitinsultcriticise 000 000 013 114Disgust 048 378 000 000Grimacevomit 000 000 000 000Contempt 081 522 000 000Starelook hard at 355 1392 147 388Shame 111 764 000 000Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 718 1905 687 1859Guilt 270 1526 000 000Justify oneselfapologise 355 1535 090 340

Note Significant differences between men and women tp lt 1 p lt 05 p lt 01 p lt 001

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 629

to look hard at which correspond to anger sadness and contempt reactionsrespectively

However a number of differences between these two types of profiles canalso be observed For example for the emotional reaction profiles for anger andsadness the second highest mean is found for guilt whereas for the behaviouralreaction profiles for these emotions the second highest mean is found for shamebehaviours (to withdrawto lower onersquos headto blush) This findings may be dueto the general confusion between shame and guilt that has been observed forWestern cultures (see eg Wallbott amp Scherer 1994)

Sex differences To assess whether male and female participants differedwith regard to their expected emotional reactions and behaviours in the differentemotion eliciting situations profile analyses were conducted on the ratings foreach emotion situation All analyses and post-hoc tests were conducted at analpha level of 05 The results are shown in Table 4

TABLE 4Results of profile analyses on self-reported likelihood

of emotional reactionsbehaviours for men andwomen (Study 2)

Vignettes F df p

AngerReactions 295 8116 005Behaviours 183 8113 079

DisgustReactions 169 8115 107Behaviours 173 8116 099

FearReactions 330 8116 002Behaviours 390 8116 001

SadnessReactions 207 8116 044Behaviours 170 8115 105

GuiltReactions 186 8117 071Behaviours 130 8115 251

ShameReactions 215 8116 037Behaviours 70 8116 689

HappinessReactions 106 8116 397Behaviours 109 8116 376

630 HESS ET AL

Emotional reactions For all emotion situations except disgust andhappiness the emotional reactions profiles were nonparallel or marginallynonparallel (see Table 4) For the nonparallel profiles post-hoc tests revealedthat a similar pattern of sex differences emerged across the different emotionthemes For happiness and serenity there were either no significant differencesbetween men and women or men reported experiencing these emotions with ahigher probability than did women Conversely for sadness fear shame andguilt there were either no significant sex differences or women reported feelingthese emotions with a higher probability than did men For anger disgust andcontempt reactions no significant differences emerged

Emotional behaviour profiles Only the fear profile was significantlynonparallel (different) for men and women The profiles for anger and disgustwere marginally nonparallel and the remaining profiles were all parallel andcoincident Thus fewer significant differences between menrsquos and womenrsquosexpected behaviours in the situations described by the vignettes were found thanwas the case for the expected emotional reactions in Studies 1 and 2 Yet it isimportant to note that the probabilities reported for the behavioural profiles werelower overall and it is thus possible that this lack of differences is due to a lackof sensitivity of the measure

As postulated based on previous research (eg Crawford Clippax OnyxGault amp Benton 1992) as well as on the emotional reactions profile womenreport a higher probability of either crying or isolating oneself in an angersituation than do men Conversely and in accordance with both the literature onanger expression (see earlier) and the results from the emotional reactionsprofile men report it more likely to hitto insultto criticise than women thoughthis difference is not significant In addition they report that they aresignificantly more likely to stareto look hard (contempt) than do women abehaviour that could also be interpreted as aggressive when shown in responseto an insult

As regards the disgust situations men report that they are more likely tolaughto get excited This sex difference matches the finding for the emotionalreactions profile but was not found in Study 1 Finally for the fear situation menreport that they are more likely to hitto insultto criticise as well as to smiletorelaxto contemplate (serenity) than do women The emotional reactions profilefor fear from this study shows that men report a higher probability of reactingwith serenity but not with anger than do women As these behaviourscorrespond to a macho or cool demeanour in a threatening situation they fit thegeneral stereotype of masculine behaviour Conversely women report to bemore likely to trembleto freeze as well as to cryto isolate one self in fearsituations

In sum although many fewer sex differences reached significance whencomparing self-reported expected behaviours for men and women the pattern of

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 631

results is largely congruent with previous findings Specifically women reporteda higher probability of showing behaviours congruent with sadness and fear thandid men whereas men reported higher probabilities for anger and serenebehaviours In addition men reported a higher probability of showing acontempt behaviour in an anger situation yet the relevant behaviour (to staretolook hard) could be interpreted as aggressive in that context

How congruent are the findings fromStudies 1 and 2

As mentioned earlier not all significant differences found in Study 1 for theexpected reactions for men and women in general were also found for self-reports of expected reactions by men and women for themselves Yet as theresults for the two studies are based on different degrees of freedomsignificance levels cannot be directly compared To assess whether stereotypicaland self-reported sex differences were of similar magnitude we computed theeffect sizes for both studies Table 5 shows Cohenrsquos d for the post-hoc

TABLE 5Cohenrsquos d for sex differences in Studies 1 and 2

Study 1 Study 2

SituationEmotionalreactions

Emotionalreactions

Emotionalbehaviours

AngerHappiness 7023Serenity 7025Sadness 203 073 041Fear 123 030Anger 7055 7030Disgust 068Contempt 7026Shame 117 7035Guilt 129

DisgustHappiness 7032 7037 7047Serenity 7045 7026 7021Sadness 095 027Fear 189 033 033AngerDisgust 160 024 024Contempt 050Shame 062 7028 026Guilt 062 020

(Continued)

632 HESS ET AL

TABLE 5(Continued)

Study 1 Study 2

SituationEmotionalreactions

Emotionalreactions

Emotionalbehaviours

SadnessHappiness 7053Serenity 7032Sadness 184 022 024Fear 171 031Anger 7065 042Disgust 7030 7025Contempt 021Shame 020 7046 054Guilt 176 022 7033

FearHappiness 7021 7030Serenity 7026 7041 7052Sadness 189 055Fear 221 082 046Anger 7084 7043Disgust 067ContemptShame 049 7026Guilt 172 7025

ShameHappiness 7045 7023Serenity 7027 7020 7031Sadness 175 041Fear 128Anger 7069Disgust 065Contempt 054Shame 154 035Guilt 153 050

GuiltHappiness 7107 7035Serenity 7051Sadness 198 032 051Fear 162 029AngerDisgust 128Contempt 075Shame 178 051Guilt 183 020

633

comparisons for each emotion in the profile for the six negative emotionsituations across the two studies For Study 1 the effect sizes for the urban andthe rural sample were combined To facilitate the reading of the table onlydifferences for which d was at least 020 (ie equivalent to a small effect) areshown In general effect sizes for Study 1 are larger than those for Study 2 Foremotional reactions the expected differences between men and women were ofmedium (gt 050) to large (gt 080) size whereas for self-perceptions the expecteddifferences between men and women were small to medium in size

The most stable sex difference across the two studies was found for sadnessboth as a core emotion in sadness vignettes and as a secondary emotion That isfor all negative emotions the general stereotype describes women as reactingwith more sadness and women also perceive themselves as reacting with moresadness andor report more sadness behaviours Further women are expected toreact with (and they self-report) more shame and guilt reactionsbehaviours inshame and guilt situations However for the other negative emotions (angerdisgust sadness and fear) men report higher levels of shame reactions or shamebehaviours (but not both) Finally fear reactions and behaviours are described asmore likely for women in general and women perceive themselves as reactingwith more fear in disgust sadness fear and guilt situations

Another very stable sex difference across studies regards happiness andserenity reactions for negative emotion vignettes Men consistently are bothexpected to react with and self-report more happiness reactions as well ashappiness behaviours for disgust fear and shame vignettes To a lesser degreethis pattern also emerges for sadness and guilt vignettes As mentioned in thediscussion of Study 1 this may reflect differences in the value structure betweenmen and women

In sum a comparison of effect sizes shows considerable consistency acrossthe two studies Specifically noteworthy is the very consistent finding for boththe stereotypical beliefs and the self-reports with regard to sadness reactionswhich are considered as more likely for women than for men for all negativeemotion situations studied

However a number of differences between the general stereotypes and theself-perceptions also emerged specifically with regard to shame reactionsWhereas women are generally believed to be more likely to react with shameto negative emotion events the self-reported likelihood for shame as aconcomitant emotion is higher for men for all situations except for guilt(given the general confusion regarding these states observed in Westerncultures this may be due to shame being a core rather than a concomitantemotion for guilt scenarios) Yet self-reported shame behaviours are morelikely for women than for men in sadness and disgust situations A possibleexplanation is that men are actively trying to not show shame reactionsmdashtoconform to the general stereotypemdashbut are aware that they nonetheless arelikely to feel shame in those situations

634 HESS ET AL

To conclude the general stereotype and self-perceptions of emotionalreactions and behaviours suggest that women react with more sadness to all typesof negative emotion events Further the stereotypes and the self-perceptions arein agreement on menrsquos greater likelihood to react with happiness and serenity to avariety of negative emotions In contrast differences between the generalstereotypes and self-perceptions emerge for shame reactions with men reportingin situations when shame is a secondary emotion a higher likelihood of shamereactions but not necessarily shame behaviours than do women

STUDY 3

The results from Study 2 suggest that the stereotypical beliefs regarding menrsquosand womenrsquos emotional reactions and behaviours in a variety of emotion-inducing situations converge with self-perceptions of menrsquos and womenrsquosemotional reactions and behaviours in those same situations This finding isconsistent with the notion that autobiographic statements that requireparticipants to summarise over a number of related experiences may be biasedby stereotypical expectations (see eg Feldman-Barrett et al 1998) This leadsto the question of whether a similar overlap can also be found for narratives ofsingle specific emotional events from the participantsrsquo past If stereotypesindeed influence the way emotional events are reconstructed in a narrative wewould expect to find that women report more sadness events and express moresadness overall as well as more intense target emotions for all but anger eventsConversely we would expect men to report more situations involving anger aswell as experiencing more happiness and serenity overall

However as Study 3 is based on personal narratives and not on standardisedvignettes such a finding could simply be due to the fact that the emotionantecedent events in a real-life setting differ for men and women To assess thispossibility we decided to measure the emotion antecedent events by means of anappraisal questionnaire that assesses the participantsrsquo perception of the emotionantecedent situation To the degree that perceptions of emotion antecedents aresimilar for men and women while reported emotional reactions differ we canconclude that observed sex differences are not due to differences in theperception of the event per se For example if womenrsquos tendency to report moresadness were due to a difference in the perception of the emotion antecedentsituation we would expect women to report more often that they did not feel thatthey could do anything to change the situation or that they had to adapt to thesituation (as sadness is generally associated with the notion of irrevocable loss)

Overview

For this study we translated and adapted a questionnaire reported by Scherer(1988) that consists of two parts The first part invites the participants todescribe an event during which they experienced an emotion The second part

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 635

asks specific questions regarding the appraisal process We added a section inwhich we asked participants to complete an emotion profile for the event Toavoid the possibility that men and women would relate narratives from widelydifferent types of situations we asked participants to describe an event related tofamily interactions This class of situations should be readily accessible to allparticipants and ensure that emotional events involving human interactionpartners were reported

Allowing participants to choose the type of emotional events they report hasseveral advantages Most importantly we can assess what type of emotionalevents men and women choose to report spontaneously It also permitsparticipants to choose a salient event for which they can recollect theinformation necessary to respond to the appraisal questions On the other handthis approach is unlikely to result in a well-balanced distribution of emotiontopics thus making it difficult or impossible to analyse the data separately fordifferent emotion themes Yet in the context of the present study we were onlyinterested in sex differences in reports and not in absolute levels of responsesStudies 1 and 2 suggest that sex differences are very stable across all negativeemotions We therefore decided to allow participants to choose the emotiontheme and analysed the data collapsed across all negative emotion themes

Method

Participants A total of 171 students 87 men and 84 women with a meanage of 1862 years participated in this study Most of the participants (147) wererecruited from an ethnically homogenous junior college in the larger Montrealurban area (Cegep Lionel-Groulx Ste-Therese Quebec Canada) and partici-pated in groups An additional 24 participants were recruited individually

Procedure The experimenter explained that the study concerned emotionalevents in peoplersquos lives Participants were informed of their right to discontinueparticipation at any time and for any reason The experimenter then distributedthe questionnaires and responded to questions regarding the procedure The tasktook between 10 and 30 minutes Most of this time difference can be attributedto the amount of detail provided in the event description that ranged from acouple of words (eg birth of my daughter) to well over a page

Dependent measures The questionnaire consisted of four parts The firstpart was an open-ended question asking the participants to describe any eventinvolving their family life that led them to experience an emotion Sadnessshame anger guilt joy fear and disgust were provided as examples ofemotions Participants were asked to give a detailed description of the situationincluding the events that led up to it their reactions and those of others presentIn addition they were asked to identify the people involved with respect to their

636 HESS ET AL

relationship with them (eg my partner my sister etc) as well as to identify themain emotion theme of the story This served to ensure that the participantsbased their answers to the following questions on a specific event and not on aclass of similar events

Emotion description The second part of the questionnaire consisted ofquestions regarding when the event happened for how long they felt theemotion and the intensity of the core emotion identified as the emotion theme ofthe story Participants were also asked to indicate whether they tried to hide orcontrol their feelings and to what degree This part also contained the emotionprofile used in Studies 1 and 2 Using this measure participants were asked toindicate to what percentage they had felt each of the nine emotions from theprofile

Appraisal questionnaire A series of questions regarding the appraisal processwere used to assess the emotion antecedent events These questions weretranslated from the questionnaire reported by Scherer (1988) Specificallyparticipants were asked to what degree they had expected the situation to occurhow pleasant or unpleasant they considered the event whether the event helpedor hindered them in achieving their aims to what degree they considered that thesituation or the event that caused the emotion was unjust or unfair whether theevent was caused by their own or by someone elsersquos behaviour to what degreethey considered that the behaviour that caused the event would be judged asimproper or immoral by their acquaintances how the event affected theirfeelings about themselves such as their self-esteem or self-confidence andfinally to what degree the event changed their relationships with the peopleinvolved (all on negative-positive 7-point bipolar scales)

In addition participants were given a list of 11 specific potential causes of theevent (caused it myself natural causes act of god etc) They also evaluatedtheir ability to act upon or to cope with the event and its consequences using ascale involving 5 options The last part of the questionnaire consisted ofquestions regarding the participantsrsquo sex their age and whether they werecurrently seeing someone in a love-based relationship and if so for how long

Results

Of the 171 reported emotion events 147 (74 reported by men and 73 reported bywomen) concerned negative emotional events Of these a total of 62 weresadness events 22 were anger events and 11 were guilt events The remainingevents were distributed over a large number of negative emotions

As expected the very low frequency of reports for specific emotion themesmade separate analyses of reports of these events unfeasible We thereforedecided to perform analyses on the data summed over all negative emotionthemes The 24 events with positive emotion themes were obviously excludedfrom these analyses

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 637

Do women report more sadness events and men more anger events Toaddress this question a chi-square test was performed on the frequency withwhich men and women labeled the reported event as a sad versus an anger eventIn line with the results of Studies 1 and 2 we found men to report more angerevents and women to report more sadness events Specifically 14 men and 8women reported anger events and 25 men and 37 women reported sad events w2

= 355 p = 06 d = 42Do women report more intense core emotions than men For the intensity of

the core emotion experienced during the event women reported significantlyhigher levels (M = 593 SD = 101) than men (M = 554 SD = 123) t(145) =222 p = 028 d = 37

Do women and men report different levels of negative emotions across theemotion profile Figure 2 presents the emotion profiles separately for men andwomen An inspection of the profiles shows that overall men report morehappinessserenity whereas women report higher levels of all other emotionsThe profiles are nonparallel F(8 137) = 5877 p lt 001 Post-hoc analysesrevealed a significant sex difference in self-reported sadness with womenreporting higher levels than men To compare the sex differences in the profiles

Figure 2 Emotion profile for menrsquos and womenrsquos self-reported emotional reactions to negativeemotion events (Study 3)

638 HESS ET AL

found in this study with those from Studies 1 and 2 effect sizes were calculatedUsing the same cut-off point as previously (small effect size d = 020) only twodifferences were found to be stable across the three studies Men report higherlevels of happiness for negative emotion events (d = 7022) and women reporthigher levels of sadness (d = 043) As the latter difference may be due to thehigher frequency of reported sadness events by women we also verified whetherwomen report higher levels of sadness when sadness events are excluded fromthe analysis An inspection of the means revealed a marginally significantdifference in the same direction M = 6472 SD = 3247 and M = 5108 SD =3684 for women and men respectively t(83) = 181 p = 074 d = 40

Are there differences in appraisal patterns between men and women Asmentioned earlier the reported differences in emotional reactions could be dueto differences in the perception of the emotion antecedent events Yet nodifferences in appraisal patterns were found suggesting that emotion antecedentevents were perceived similarly In addition despite the more frequent and moreintense reports of sadness women did not report different coping styles thanmen and did not seem to feel more helpless (38 men vs 34 women report thisreaction) In fact women more frequently report that they felt able to lsquolsquoinfluencethe situation positivelyrsquorsquo (19 women vs 9 men report this reaction though thedifference is not significant)

Discussion

Study 3 extended the study of emotion stereotypes and self-perceptions based onvignettes to narratives of emotional events that the participants had in factexperienced themselves The goal of the study was to investigate whether thefindings from Studies 1 and 2 generalise to such recollections of personal eventsThe results strongly suggest this to be the case Women again report higherlevels of sadness for negative emotion events They also report more sad eventsin general Men on the other hand report more anger events as well as morehappiness for negative emotion events as was found in both Studies 1 and 2 Yetno reported differences in appraisal or coping emerged This suggests that theobserved differences in emotional reactions are not due to a bias in the appraisalprocess nor to an inability to act upon the event

If emotion antecedents do not differ why are differences in emotionalreactions reported We suggest that such differences represent an influence ofthe general emotion stereotype on the narrative reconstruction of a personalevent This conclusion is based on the observation of a null effect and thus opento the critique that the present study lacked the power necessary to detect realdifferences in appraisal between men and women To assess this critique wecalculated the absolute mean effect size for the interval-scaled appraisalquestions to be d = 015 To achieve 80 power a sample of 1100 participantswould be needed These data underscore the very slim differences in appraisals

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 639

between men and women making it highly unlikely that the effects observed inthis study are mediated by a difference in appraisal and thus by a difference inthe perception of the underlying event

CONCLUSIONS

The present series of studies had the goal to assess general emotion stereotypesand their influence on self-perceptions of emotional reactions by men andwomen We wanted to both describe these stereotypes in more detail with regardnot only to the modal emotion for a specific event (such as sadness reactions to aloss) but also with regard to the secondary emotions present in these situationsFurther we wanted to assess to what degree such expectations for men andwomen in general are endorsed by individuals for themselves as well as whetherthey would be spontaneously reported when relating a personally experiencedevent

Two gender differences were found to be stable across all three experimentalparadigms Women are expected to be more likely to react with sadness in allnegative emotion situations they expect themselves to be more likely to reactwith sadness as well as to cry and to withdraw more and finally women reportmore sadness in personal events In contrast men are expected to react withmore happinessserenity during negative emotional situations they expectthemselves to react more frequently this way as well as to laugh and smile moreand to be more relaxed They also tend to report more happiness whendescribing negative personal events

Not all general emotion stereotypes were found in the self-perceptionsstudied in Studies 2 and 3 Specifically according to Study 1 women areexpected to be more likely to react with shame and guilt in all negative emotionsituations Yet women did not expect to do so for themselves in situations otherthan shame and guilt situations and in fact men reported to be more likely toreact with shame in a variety of situations Further men and women did notreport any differences with regard to experiences of shame and guilt during thepersonal events

Study 3 included an appraisal questionnaire to address the question whetherthe self-reported differences in emotionality between men and women are due todifferences in the appraisal of the emotion antecedent events or rather to theinfluence of the prevalent norms No differences in appraisals were detectedsuggesting that the self-reported differences may be due to the normative forcesof the general stereotype rather than to appraisal differences

It may be argued that the Study 3 is based on recollections of past events andthat self-reports of emotional experiences represent after the fact reconstructionsthat differ from the actually experienced emotions during the event (seeParkinson amp Manstead 1993) A related argument may be made for Study 2where participants had to estimate the likelihood of their emotional reactions to

640 HESS ET AL

hypothetical events (even though the latter were chosen to be common everydayevents) This may well be true Yet the question remains why did men andwomen reconstruct the events differently in terms of their emotional reactionsThe answer would then be that the prevalent emotion stereotype which islargely endorsed by the population studied influenced this reconstruction Yetas peoplesrsquo sense of self depends on their past histories this would imply thatreconstructions of emotional events in line with emotion stereotypes mayeventually lead individuals to conform more closely to these stereotypes as theybecome more and more part of their emotional history and eventually of theiremotional self

Manuscript received 30 May 1997Revised manuscript received 23 February 2000

REFERENCES

Adams S Kuebli J Boyle PA amp Fivush R (1995) Gender differences in parent-childconversations about past emotions A longitudinal investigation Sex Roles 33 309ndash323

Allen JG amp Haccoun DM (1976) Sex differences in emotionality A multidimensional approachHuman Relations 29 711ndash722

Averill JR (1997) The emotions An integrative approach In R Hogan JA Johnson amp SRBriggs (Eds) Handbook of personality psychology (pp 513ndash541) San Diego CA AcademicPress

Birnbaum DW (1983) Preschoolersrsquo stereotypes about sex differences in emotionality Areaffirmation Journal of Genetic Psychology 143 139ndash140

Briton NJ amp Hall JA (1995) Gender-based expectancies and observer judgements of smilingJournal of Nonverbal Behavior 19 49ndash65

Brody LR amp Hall JA (1993) Gender and emotion In M Lewis amp JM Haviland (Eds)Handbook of emotions (pp 447-460) New York Guilford Press

Crawford J Clippax S Onyx J Gault U amp Benton P (1992) Emotion and genderConstructing meaning from memory London Sage

Dunn J Bretherton I amp Munn P (1987) Conversations about feeling states between mothers andtheir children Developmental Psychology 23 132ndash139

Eagly AH amp Mladinic A (1989) Gender stereotypes and attitudes toward women and menPersonality and Social Psychology Bulletin 15 543ndash558

Ekman P amp Friesen W (1986) A new pan-cultural facial expression of emotion Motivation andEmotion 10 159ndash168

Feldman-Barrett L Robin L Pietromonaco PR amp Eysell KM (1998) Are women the moreemotional sex Evidence from emotional experiences in social context Cognition and Emotion12 555ndash578

Fernandez-Dols J-M amp Ruiz-Belda M-A (1995) Are smiles a sign of happiness Gold medalwinners at the Olympic Games Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 69 1113ndash1119

Fischer A (1993) Sex differences in emotionality Fact or stereotype Feminism and Psychology 3303ndash318

Fivush R (1989) Exploring differences in the emotional content of mother child conversationsabout the past Sex Roles 20 675ndash691

Frank MG amp Ekman P (1993) Not all smiles are created equal The differences betweenenjoyment and nonenjoymen t smiles [Special Issue Current issues in psychological humorresearch] Humor International Journal of Humor Research 6 9ndash26

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 641

Gallois C (1994) Group membership social rules and power A social psychologica l perspectiveon emotional communication Journal of Pragmatics 22 301ndash324

Hall JA (1984) Nonverbal sex differences Communication accuracy and expressive styleBaltimore MD Johns Hopkins University Press

Izard C (1972) Patterns of emotions A new analysis of anxiety and depression New YorkAcademic Press

Jussim L Milbourn M amp Nelson W (1991) Emotional openness Sex-role stereotypes and self-perceptions Representative Research in Social Psychology 19 35ndash52

Kirouac G amp Hess U (1999) Group membership and the decoding of nonverbal behavior In PPhilippot R Feldman amp E Coats (Eds) The social context of nonverbal behavior (pp 182ndash210) New York Cambridge University Press

Kring AM amp Gordon AH (1998) Sex differences in emotion Expression experience andphysiology Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74 686ndash703

LaFrance M amp Banaji M (1992) Toward a reconsideration of the gender-emotion relationship InMS Clark (Ed) Emotion and social behavior Review of personality and social psychology(Vol 14 pp 178ndash201) Newbury Park CA Sage

LaFrance M amp Hecht MA (1995) Why smiles generate leniency Personality and SocialPsychology Bulletin 21 207ndash214

Lazarus RS (1991) Emotion and adaptation Oxford UK Oxford University PressParkinson B amp Manstead ASR (1993) Making sense of emotion in stories and social life

Cognition and Emotion 7 295ndash323Plutchik R (1980) Emotion A psychoevolutionar y synthesis New York Harper amp RowRime B Mesquita B Philippot P amp Boca S (1991) Beyond the emotional event Six studies on

the social sharing of emotion Cognition and Emotion 5 435ndash465Scherer KR (1988) Appendix C Questionnaire used in the International Survey on Emotion

Antecedents and Reactions (ISEAR) In KR Scherer (Ed) Facets of emotion Recent researchHillsdale NJ Erlbaum

Sherman JW amp Bessenhoff GR (1999) Stereotypes as source monitoring cues On theinteraction between episodic and semantic memory Psychological Science 10 106ndash110

Stoppard JM amp Gruchy CD (1993) Gender context and expression of positive emotionPersonality and Social Psychology Bulletin 19 143ndash150

Tucker JS amp Riggio RE (1988) The role of social skills in encoding posed and spontaneousfacial expressions Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 12 87ndash97

Wallbott HG amp Scherer KR (1994) Cultural determinants in experiencing shame and guilt InJune Price Tangney amp Kurt W Fischer (Eds) Self conscious emotions The psychology of shameand guilt embarrasment and pride (pp 465ndash487) New York Guilford Press

642 HESS ET AL

TABLE 3(Continued)

Men Women

Situation Mean SD Mean SD

Smilerelaxcontemplate 1048 2243 182 666Sadness 2333 3051 2929 3588Cryisolate oneself 1306 2536 3022 3582Fear 5111 3207 7535 2715Tremblefreeze 2008 2565 3378 3378Anger 2468 3297 1954 2949Hitinsultcriticise 1222 2098 446 1410Disgust 787 1808 1006 2206Grimacevomit 429 1270 365 1115Contempt 1192 2216 1141 2078Starelook hard at 677 1822 391 1405Shame 143 470 200 615Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 1606 2579 1000 2117Guilt 794 2199 369 995Justify oneselfapologise 282 1263 276 1319

ShameHappiness 452 1596 144 1039Laughget excited 1825 2905 1387 1990Serenity 444 1492 182 1028Smilerelaxcontemplate 1206t 2333 623 1262Sadness 1151 2121 2077 2361Cryisolate oneself 334 877 426 1107Fear 1246 2431 1135 1700Tremblefreeze 776 1569 894 1491Anger 1262 2259 1432 2408Hitinsultcriticise 565 1478 314 1140Disgust 206 966 347 1244Grimacevomit 202 590 231 1086Contempt 730 1532 811 1880Starelook hard at 347 833 304 1160Shame 4819 3534 5968 2948Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 2563 2974 2885 2908Guilt 3095 3442 4788 3282Justify oneselfapologise 4379 3144 4256 3074

GuiltHappiness 1024 2432 355 1189Laughget excited 734 2259 584 1761Serenity 262 1008 223 771Smilerelaxcontemplate 645 1692 416 1409Sadness 2003t 2705 2971 3390Cryisolate oneself 960 1992 2273 2979Fear 1778 2667 2653 3305

(Continued)

628

differences we will not discuss these data in detail However two things arenoteworthy First both men and women report lower probabilities that theywould react with a certain behaviour for example lsquolsquoto laughto get excitedrsquorsquothan with the emotion that corresponds to the behaviour (happiness) Thisfinding is not unexpected as individuals do not always express their emotionsoutwardly or may have developed idiosyncratic means of expressing certainemotions Second the profile data for the behaviours resemble strongly theemotional reactions reported For example for anger the highest means arefound for to hitto insultto criticise for to cryto isolate one self and for to stare

TABLE 3(Continued)

Men Women

Situation Mean SD Mean SD

Tremblefreeze 1206 2212 1227 2024Anger 1762 2980 1926 2950Hitinsultcriticise 129 543 221 720Disgust 1248 2569 1152 2402Grimacevomit 581 1642 351 1385Contempt 1603 2857 1464 2611Starelook hard at 129 495 136 485Shame 2667 3227 5375 3467Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 1952 2472 1769 2333Guilt 5071 3885 5753 3372Justify oneselfapologise 4484 3581 4286 3608

HappinessHappiness 8913 1981 9106 1471Laughget excited 5763 3420 6069 3283Serenity 2738t 3650 3906 3797Smilerelaxcontemplate 5451 3445 4647 3432Sadness 127 946 020 123Cryisolate oneself 040 318 029 141Fear 103 372 206 680Tremblefreeze 419t 1313 090 057Anger 032 252 000 000Hitinsultcriticise 000 000 013 114Disgust 048 378 000 000Grimacevomit 000 000 000 000Contempt 081 522 000 000Starelook hard at 355 1392 147 388Shame 111 764 000 000Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 718 1905 687 1859Guilt 270 1526 000 000Justify oneselfapologise 355 1535 090 340

Note Significant differences between men and women tp lt 1 p lt 05 p lt 01 p lt 001

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 629

to look hard at which correspond to anger sadness and contempt reactionsrespectively

However a number of differences between these two types of profiles canalso be observed For example for the emotional reaction profiles for anger andsadness the second highest mean is found for guilt whereas for the behaviouralreaction profiles for these emotions the second highest mean is found for shamebehaviours (to withdrawto lower onersquos headto blush) This findings may be dueto the general confusion between shame and guilt that has been observed forWestern cultures (see eg Wallbott amp Scherer 1994)

Sex differences To assess whether male and female participants differedwith regard to their expected emotional reactions and behaviours in the differentemotion eliciting situations profile analyses were conducted on the ratings foreach emotion situation All analyses and post-hoc tests were conducted at analpha level of 05 The results are shown in Table 4

TABLE 4Results of profile analyses on self-reported likelihood

of emotional reactionsbehaviours for men andwomen (Study 2)

Vignettes F df p

AngerReactions 295 8116 005Behaviours 183 8113 079

DisgustReactions 169 8115 107Behaviours 173 8116 099

FearReactions 330 8116 002Behaviours 390 8116 001

SadnessReactions 207 8116 044Behaviours 170 8115 105

GuiltReactions 186 8117 071Behaviours 130 8115 251

ShameReactions 215 8116 037Behaviours 70 8116 689

HappinessReactions 106 8116 397Behaviours 109 8116 376

630 HESS ET AL

Emotional reactions For all emotion situations except disgust andhappiness the emotional reactions profiles were nonparallel or marginallynonparallel (see Table 4) For the nonparallel profiles post-hoc tests revealedthat a similar pattern of sex differences emerged across the different emotionthemes For happiness and serenity there were either no significant differencesbetween men and women or men reported experiencing these emotions with ahigher probability than did women Conversely for sadness fear shame andguilt there were either no significant sex differences or women reported feelingthese emotions with a higher probability than did men For anger disgust andcontempt reactions no significant differences emerged

Emotional behaviour profiles Only the fear profile was significantlynonparallel (different) for men and women The profiles for anger and disgustwere marginally nonparallel and the remaining profiles were all parallel andcoincident Thus fewer significant differences between menrsquos and womenrsquosexpected behaviours in the situations described by the vignettes were found thanwas the case for the expected emotional reactions in Studies 1 and 2 Yet it isimportant to note that the probabilities reported for the behavioural profiles werelower overall and it is thus possible that this lack of differences is due to a lackof sensitivity of the measure

As postulated based on previous research (eg Crawford Clippax OnyxGault amp Benton 1992) as well as on the emotional reactions profile womenreport a higher probability of either crying or isolating oneself in an angersituation than do men Conversely and in accordance with both the literature onanger expression (see earlier) and the results from the emotional reactionsprofile men report it more likely to hitto insultto criticise than women thoughthis difference is not significant In addition they report that they aresignificantly more likely to stareto look hard (contempt) than do women abehaviour that could also be interpreted as aggressive when shown in responseto an insult

As regards the disgust situations men report that they are more likely tolaughto get excited This sex difference matches the finding for the emotionalreactions profile but was not found in Study 1 Finally for the fear situation menreport that they are more likely to hitto insultto criticise as well as to smiletorelaxto contemplate (serenity) than do women The emotional reactions profilefor fear from this study shows that men report a higher probability of reactingwith serenity but not with anger than do women As these behaviourscorrespond to a macho or cool demeanour in a threatening situation they fit thegeneral stereotype of masculine behaviour Conversely women report to bemore likely to trembleto freeze as well as to cryto isolate one self in fearsituations

In sum although many fewer sex differences reached significance whencomparing self-reported expected behaviours for men and women the pattern of

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 631

results is largely congruent with previous findings Specifically women reporteda higher probability of showing behaviours congruent with sadness and fear thandid men whereas men reported higher probabilities for anger and serenebehaviours In addition men reported a higher probability of showing acontempt behaviour in an anger situation yet the relevant behaviour (to staretolook hard) could be interpreted as aggressive in that context

How congruent are the findings fromStudies 1 and 2

As mentioned earlier not all significant differences found in Study 1 for theexpected reactions for men and women in general were also found for self-reports of expected reactions by men and women for themselves Yet as theresults for the two studies are based on different degrees of freedomsignificance levels cannot be directly compared To assess whether stereotypicaland self-reported sex differences were of similar magnitude we computed theeffect sizes for both studies Table 5 shows Cohenrsquos d for the post-hoc

TABLE 5Cohenrsquos d for sex differences in Studies 1 and 2

Study 1 Study 2

SituationEmotionalreactions

Emotionalreactions

Emotionalbehaviours

AngerHappiness 7023Serenity 7025Sadness 203 073 041Fear 123 030Anger 7055 7030Disgust 068Contempt 7026Shame 117 7035Guilt 129

DisgustHappiness 7032 7037 7047Serenity 7045 7026 7021Sadness 095 027Fear 189 033 033AngerDisgust 160 024 024Contempt 050Shame 062 7028 026Guilt 062 020

(Continued)

632 HESS ET AL

TABLE 5(Continued)

Study 1 Study 2

SituationEmotionalreactions

Emotionalreactions

Emotionalbehaviours

SadnessHappiness 7053Serenity 7032Sadness 184 022 024Fear 171 031Anger 7065 042Disgust 7030 7025Contempt 021Shame 020 7046 054Guilt 176 022 7033

FearHappiness 7021 7030Serenity 7026 7041 7052Sadness 189 055Fear 221 082 046Anger 7084 7043Disgust 067ContemptShame 049 7026Guilt 172 7025

ShameHappiness 7045 7023Serenity 7027 7020 7031Sadness 175 041Fear 128Anger 7069Disgust 065Contempt 054Shame 154 035Guilt 153 050

GuiltHappiness 7107 7035Serenity 7051Sadness 198 032 051Fear 162 029AngerDisgust 128Contempt 075Shame 178 051Guilt 183 020

633

comparisons for each emotion in the profile for the six negative emotionsituations across the two studies For Study 1 the effect sizes for the urban andthe rural sample were combined To facilitate the reading of the table onlydifferences for which d was at least 020 (ie equivalent to a small effect) areshown In general effect sizes for Study 1 are larger than those for Study 2 Foremotional reactions the expected differences between men and women were ofmedium (gt 050) to large (gt 080) size whereas for self-perceptions the expecteddifferences between men and women were small to medium in size

The most stable sex difference across the two studies was found for sadnessboth as a core emotion in sadness vignettes and as a secondary emotion That isfor all negative emotions the general stereotype describes women as reactingwith more sadness and women also perceive themselves as reacting with moresadness andor report more sadness behaviours Further women are expected toreact with (and they self-report) more shame and guilt reactionsbehaviours inshame and guilt situations However for the other negative emotions (angerdisgust sadness and fear) men report higher levels of shame reactions or shamebehaviours (but not both) Finally fear reactions and behaviours are described asmore likely for women in general and women perceive themselves as reactingwith more fear in disgust sadness fear and guilt situations

Another very stable sex difference across studies regards happiness andserenity reactions for negative emotion vignettes Men consistently are bothexpected to react with and self-report more happiness reactions as well ashappiness behaviours for disgust fear and shame vignettes To a lesser degreethis pattern also emerges for sadness and guilt vignettes As mentioned in thediscussion of Study 1 this may reflect differences in the value structure betweenmen and women

In sum a comparison of effect sizes shows considerable consistency acrossthe two studies Specifically noteworthy is the very consistent finding for boththe stereotypical beliefs and the self-reports with regard to sadness reactionswhich are considered as more likely for women than for men for all negativeemotion situations studied

However a number of differences between the general stereotypes and theself-perceptions also emerged specifically with regard to shame reactionsWhereas women are generally believed to be more likely to react with shameto negative emotion events the self-reported likelihood for shame as aconcomitant emotion is higher for men for all situations except for guilt(given the general confusion regarding these states observed in Westerncultures this may be due to shame being a core rather than a concomitantemotion for guilt scenarios) Yet self-reported shame behaviours are morelikely for women than for men in sadness and disgust situations A possibleexplanation is that men are actively trying to not show shame reactionsmdashtoconform to the general stereotypemdashbut are aware that they nonetheless arelikely to feel shame in those situations

634 HESS ET AL

To conclude the general stereotype and self-perceptions of emotionalreactions and behaviours suggest that women react with more sadness to all typesof negative emotion events Further the stereotypes and the self-perceptions arein agreement on menrsquos greater likelihood to react with happiness and serenity to avariety of negative emotions In contrast differences between the generalstereotypes and self-perceptions emerge for shame reactions with men reportingin situations when shame is a secondary emotion a higher likelihood of shamereactions but not necessarily shame behaviours than do women

STUDY 3

The results from Study 2 suggest that the stereotypical beliefs regarding menrsquosand womenrsquos emotional reactions and behaviours in a variety of emotion-inducing situations converge with self-perceptions of menrsquos and womenrsquosemotional reactions and behaviours in those same situations This finding isconsistent with the notion that autobiographic statements that requireparticipants to summarise over a number of related experiences may be biasedby stereotypical expectations (see eg Feldman-Barrett et al 1998) This leadsto the question of whether a similar overlap can also be found for narratives ofsingle specific emotional events from the participantsrsquo past If stereotypesindeed influence the way emotional events are reconstructed in a narrative wewould expect to find that women report more sadness events and express moresadness overall as well as more intense target emotions for all but anger eventsConversely we would expect men to report more situations involving anger aswell as experiencing more happiness and serenity overall

However as Study 3 is based on personal narratives and not on standardisedvignettes such a finding could simply be due to the fact that the emotionantecedent events in a real-life setting differ for men and women To assess thispossibility we decided to measure the emotion antecedent events by means of anappraisal questionnaire that assesses the participantsrsquo perception of the emotionantecedent situation To the degree that perceptions of emotion antecedents aresimilar for men and women while reported emotional reactions differ we canconclude that observed sex differences are not due to differences in theperception of the event per se For example if womenrsquos tendency to report moresadness were due to a difference in the perception of the emotion antecedentsituation we would expect women to report more often that they did not feel thatthey could do anything to change the situation or that they had to adapt to thesituation (as sadness is generally associated with the notion of irrevocable loss)

Overview

For this study we translated and adapted a questionnaire reported by Scherer(1988) that consists of two parts The first part invites the participants todescribe an event during which they experienced an emotion The second part

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 635

asks specific questions regarding the appraisal process We added a section inwhich we asked participants to complete an emotion profile for the event Toavoid the possibility that men and women would relate narratives from widelydifferent types of situations we asked participants to describe an event related tofamily interactions This class of situations should be readily accessible to allparticipants and ensure that emotional events involving human interactionpartners were reported

Allowing participants to choose the type of emotional events they report hasseveral advantages Most importantly we can assess what type of emotionalevents men and women choose to report spontaneously It also permitsparticipants to choose a salient event for which they can recollect theinformation necessary to respond to the appraisal questions On the other handthis approach is unlikely to result in a well-balanced distribution of emotiontopics thus making it difficult or impossible to analyse the data separately fordifferent emotion themes Yet in the context of the present study we were onlyinterested in sex differences in reports and not in absolute levels of responsesStudies 1 and 2 suggest that sex differences are very stable across all negativeemotions We therefore decided to allow participants to choose the emotiontheme and analysed the data collapsed across all negative emotion themes

Method

Participants A total of 171 students 87 men and 84 women with a meanage of 1862 years participated in this study Most of the participants (147) wererecruited from an ethnically homogenous junior college in the larger Montrealurban area (Cegep Lionel-Groulx Ste-Therese Quebec Canada) and partici-pated in groups An additional 24 participants were recruited individually

Procedure The experimenter explained that the study concerned emotionalevents in peoplersquos lives Participants were informed of their right to discontinueparticipation at any time and for any reason The experimenter then distributedthe questionnaires and responded to questions regarding the procedure The tasktook between 10 and 30 minutes Most of this time difference can be attributedto the amount of detail provided in the event description that ranged from acouple of words (eg birth of my daughter) to well over a page

Dependent measures The questionnaire consisted of four parts The firstpart was an open-ended question asking the participants to describe any eventinvolving their family life that led them to experience an emotion Sadnessshame anger guilt joy fear and disgust were provided as examples ofemotions Participants were asked to give a detailed description of the situationincluding the events that led up to it their reactions and those of others presentIn addition they were asked to identify the people involved with respect to their

636 HESS ET AL

relationship with them (eg my partner my sister etc) as well as to identify themain emotion theme of the story This served to ensure that the participantsbased their answers to the following questions on a specific event and not on aclass of similar events

Emotion description The second part of the questionnaire consisted ofquestions regarding when the event happened for how long they felt theemotion and the intensity of the core emotion identified as the emotion theme ofthe story Participants were also asked to indicate whether they tried to hide orcontrol their feelings and to what degree This part also contained the emotionprofile used in Studies 1 and 2 Using this measure participants were asked toindicate to what percentage they had felt each of the nine emotions from theprofile

Appraisal questionnaire A series of questions regarding the appraisal processwere used to assess the emotion antecedent events These questions weretranslated from the questionnaire reported by Scherer (1988) Specificallyparticipants were asked to what degree they had expected the situation to occurhow pleasant or unpleasant they considered the event whether the event helpedor hindered them in achieving their aims to what degree they considered that thesituation or the event that caused the emotion was unjust or unfair whether theevent was caused by their own or by someone elsersquos behaviour to what degreethey considered that the behaviour that caused the event would be judged asimproper or immoral by their acquaintances how the event affected theirfeelings about themselves such as their self-esteem or self-confidence andfinally to what degree the event changed their relationships with the peopleinvolved (all on negative-positive 7-point bipolar scales)

In addition participants were given a list of 11 specific potential causes of theevent (caused it myself natural causes act of god etc) They also evaluatedtheir ability to act upon or to cope with the event and its consequences using ascale involving 5 options The last part of the questionnaire consisted ofquestions regarding the participantsrsquo sex their age and whether they werecurrently seeing someone in a love-based relationship and if so for how long

Results

Of the 171 reported emotion events 147 (74 reported by men and 73 reported bywomen) concerned negative emotional events Of these a total of 62 weresadness events 22 were anger events and 11 were guilt events The remainingevents were distributed over a large number of negative emotions

As expected the very low frequency of reports for specific emotion themesmade separate analyses of reports of these events unfeasible We thereforedecided to perform analyses on the data summed over all negative emotionthemes The 24 events with positive emotion themes were obviously excludedfrom these analyses

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 637

Do women report more sadness events and men more anger events Toaddress this question a chi-square test was performed on the frequency withwhich men and women labeled the reported event as a sad versus an anger eventIn line with the results of Studies 1 and 2 we found men to report more angerevents and women to report more sadness events Specifically 14 men and 8women reported anger events and 25 men and 37 women reported sad events w2

= 355 p = 06 d = 42Do women report more intense core emotions than men For the intensity of

the core emotion experienced during the event women reported significantlyhigher levels (M = 593 SD = 101) than men (M = 554 SD = 123) t(145) =222 p = 028 d = 37

Do women and men report different levels of negative emotions across theemotion profile Figure 2 presents the emotion profiles separately for men andwomen An inspection of the profiles shows that overall men report morehappinessserenity whereas women report higher levels of all other emotionsThe profiles are nonparallel F(8 137) = 5877 p lt 001 Post-hoc analysesrevealed a significant sex difference in self-reported sadness with womenreporting higher levels than men To compare the sex differences in the profiles

Figure 2 Emotion profile for menrsquos and womenrsquos self-reported emotional reactions to negativeemotion events (Study 3)

638 HESS ET AL

found in this study with those from Studies 1 and 2 effect sizes were calculatedUsing the same cut-off point as previously (small effect size d = 020) only twodifferences were found to be stable across the three studies Men report higherlevels of happiness for negative emotion events (d = 7022) and women reporthigher levels of sadness (d = 043) As the latter difference may be due to thehigher frequency of reported sadness events by women we also verified whetherwomen report higher levels of sadness when sadness events are excluded fromthe analysis An inspection of the means revealed a marginally significantdifference in the same direction M = 6472 SD = 3247 and M = 5108 SD =3684 for women and men respectively t(83) = 181 p = 074 d = 40

Are there differences in appraisal patterns between men and women Asmentioned earlier the reported differences in emotional reactions could be dueto differences in the perception of the emotion antecedent events Yet nodifferences in appraisal patterns were found suggesting that emotion antecedentevents were perceived similarly In addition despite the more frequent and moreintense reports of sadness women did not report different coping styles thanmen and did not seem to feel more helpless (38 men vs 34 women report thisreaction) In fact women more frequently report that they felt able to lsquolsquoinfluencethe situation positivelyrsquorsquo (19 women vs 9 men report this reaction though thedifference is not significant)

Discussion

Study 3 extended the study of emotion stereotypes and self-perceptions based onvignettes to narratives of emotional events that the participants had in factexperienced themselves The goal of the study was to investigate whether thefindings from Studies 1 and 2 generalise to such recollections of personal eventsThe results strongly suggest this to be the case Women again report higherlevels of sadness for negative emotion events They also report more sad eventsin general Men on the other hand report more anger events as well as morehappiness for negative emotion events as was found in both Studies 1 and 2 Yetno reported differences in appraisal or coping emerged This suggests that theobserved differences in emotional reactions are not due to a bias in the appraisalprocess nor to an inability to act upon the event

If emotion antecedents do not differ why are differences in emotionalreactions reported We suggest that such differences represent an influence ofthe general emotion stereotype on the narrative reconstruction of a personalevent This conclusion is based on the observation of a null effect and thus opento the critique that the present study lacked the power necessary to detect realdifferences in appraisal between men and women To assess this critique wecalculated the absolute mean effect size for the interval-scaled appraisalquestions to be d = 015 To achieve 80 power a sample of 1100 participantswould be needed These data underscore the very slim differences in appraisals

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 639

between men and women making it highly unlikely that the effects observed inthis study are mediated by a difference in appraisal and thus by a difference inthe perception of the underlying event

CONCLUSIONS

The present series of studies had the goal to assess general emotion stereotypesand their influence on self-perceptions of emotional reactions by men andwomen We wanted to both describe these stereotypes in more detail with regardnot only to the modal emotion for a specific event (such as sadness reactions to aloss) but also with regard to the secondary emotions present in these situationsFurther we wanted to assess to what degree such expectations for men andwomen in general are endorsed by individuals for themselves as well as whetherthey would be spontaneously reported when relating a personally experiencedevent

Two gender differences were found to be stable across all three experimentalparadigms Women are expected to be more likely to react with sadness in allnegative emotion situations they expect themselves to be more likely to reactwith sadness as well as to cry and to withdraw more and finally women reportmore sadness in personal events In contrast men are expected to react withmore happinessserenity during negative emotional situations they expectthemselves to react more frequently this way as well as to laugh and smile moreand to be more relaxed They also tend to report more happiness whendescribing negative personal events

Not all general emotion stereotypes were found in the self-perceptionsstudied in Studies 2 and 3 Specifically according to Study 1 women areexpected to be more likely to react with shame and guilt in all negative emotionsituations Yet women did not expect to do so for themselves in situations otherthan shame and guilt situations and in fact men reported to be more likely toreact with shame in a variety of situations Further men and women did notreport any differences with regard to experiences of shame and guilt during thepersonal events

Study 3 included an appraisal questionnaire to address the question whetherthe self-reported differences in emotionality between men and women are due todifferences in the appraisal of the emotion antecedent events or rather to theinfluence of the prevalent norms No differences in appraisals were detectedsuggesting that the self-reported differences may be due to the normative forcesof the general stereotype rather than to appraisal differences

It may be argued that the Study 3 is based on recollections of past events andthat self-reports of emotional experiences represent after the fact reconstructionsthat differ from the actually experienced emotions during the event (seeParkinson amp Manstead 1993) A related argument may be made for Study 2where participants had to estimate the likelihood of their emotional reactions to

640 HESS ET AL

hypothetical events (even though the latter were chosen to be common everydayevents) This may well be true Yet the question remains why did men andwomen reconstruct the events differently in terms of their emotional reactionsThe answer would then be that the prevalent emotion stereotype which islargely endorsed by the population studied influenced this reconstruction Yetas peoplesrsquo sense of self depends on their past histories this would imply thatreconstructions of emotional events in line with emotion stereotypes mayeventually lead individuals to conform more closely to these stereotypes as theybecome more and more part of their emotional history and eventually of theiremotional self

Manuscript received 30 May 1997Revised manuscript received 23 February 2000

REFERENCES

Adams S Kuebli J Boyle PA amp Fivush R (1995) Gender differences in parent-childconversations about past emotions A longitudinal investigation Sex Roles 33 309ndash323

Allen JG amp Haccoun DM (1976) Sex differences in emotionality A multidimensional approachHuman Relations 29 711ndash722

Averill JR (1997) The emotions An integrative approach In R Hogan JA Johnson amp SRBriggs (Eds) Handbook of personality psychology (pp 513ndash541) San Diego CA AcademicPress

Birnbaum DW (1983) Preschoolersrsquo stereotypes about sex differences in emotionality Areaffirmation Journal of Genetic Psychology 143 139ndash140

Briton NJ amp Hall JA (1995) Gender-based expectancies and observer judgements of smilingJournal of Nonverbal Behavior 19 49ndash65

Brody LR amp Hall JA (1993) Gender and emotion In M Lewis amp JM Haviland (Eds)Handbook of emotions (pp 447-460) New York Guilford Press

Crawford J Clippax S Onyx J Gault U amp Benton P (1992) Emotion and genderConstructing meaning from memory London Sage

Dunn J Bretherton I amp Munn P (1987) Conversations about feeling states between mothers andtheir children Developmental Psychology 23 132ndash139

Eagly AH amp Mladinic A (1989) Gender stereotypes and attitudes toward women and menPersonality and Social Psychology Bulletin 15 543ndash558

Ekman P amp Friesen W (1986) A new pan-cultural facial expression of emotion Motivation andEmotion 10 159ndash168

Feldman-Barrett L Robin L Pietromonaco PR amp Eysell KM (1998) Are women the moreemotional sex Evidence from emotional experiences in social context Cognition and Emotion12 555ndash578

Fernandez-Dols J-M amp Ruiz-Belda M-A (1995) Are smiles a sign of happiness Gold medalwinners at the Olympic Games Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 69 1113ndash1119

Fischer A (1993) Sex differences in emotionality Fact or stereotype Feminism and Psychology 3303ndash318

Fivush R (1989) Exploring differences in the emotional content of mother child conversationsabout the past Sex Roles 20 675ndash691

Frank MG amp Ekman P (1993) Not all smiles are created equal The differences betweenenjoyment and nonenjoymen t smiles [Special Issue Current issues in psychological humorresearch] Humor International Journal of Humor Research 6 9ndash26

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 641

Gallois C (1994) Group membership social rules and power A social psychologica l perspectiveon emotional communication Journal of Pragmatics 22 301ndash324

Hall JA (1984) Nonverbal sex differences Communication accuracy and expressive styleBaltimore MD Johns Hopkins University Press

Izard C (1972) Patterns of emotions A new analysis of anxiety and depression New YorkAcademic Press

Jussim L Milbourn M amp Nelson W (1991) Emotional openness Sex-role stereotypes and self-perceptions Representative Research in Social Psychology 19 35ndash52

Kirouac G amp Hess U (1999) Group membership and the decoding of nonverbal behavior In PPhilippot R Feldman amp E Coats (Eds) The social context of nonverbal behavior (pp 182ndash210) New York Cambridge University Press

Kring AM amp Gordon AH (1998) Sex differences in emotion Expression experience andphysiology Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74 686ndash703

LaFrance M amp Banaji M (1992) Toward a reconsideration of the gender-emotion relationship InMS Clark (Ed) Emotion and social behavior Review of personality and social psychology(Vol 14 pp 178ndash201) Newbury Park CA Sage

LaFrance M amp Hecht MA (1995) Why smiles generate leniency Personality and SocialPsychology Bulletin 21 207ndash214

Lazarus RS (1991) Emotion and adaptation Oxford UK Oxford University PressParkinson B amp Manstead ASR (1993) Making sense of emotion in stories and social life

Cognition and Emotion 7 295ndash323Plutchik R (1980) Emotion A psychoevolutionar y synthesis New York Harper amp RowRime B Mesquita B Philippot P amp Boca S (1991) Beyond the emotional event Six studies on

the social sharing of emotion Cognition and Emotion 5 435ndash465Scherer KR (1988) Appendix C Questionnaire used in the International Survey on Emotion

Antecedents and Reactions (ISEAR) In KR Scherer (Ed) Facets of emotion Recent researchHillsdale NJ Erlbaum

Sherman JW amp Bessenhoff GR (1999) Stereotypes as source monitoring cues On theinteraction between episodic and semantic memory Psychological Science 10 106ndash110

Stoppard JM amp Gruchy CD (1993) Gender context and expression of positive emotionPersonality and Social Psychology Bulletin 19 143ndash150

Tucker JS amp Riggio RE (1988) The role of social skills in encoding posed and spontaneousfacial expressions Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 12 87ndash97

Wallbott HG amp Scherer KR (1994) Cultural determinants in experiencing shame and guilt InJune Price Tangney amp Kurt W Fischer (Eds) Self conscious emotions The psychology of shameand guilt embarrasment and pride (pp 465ndash487) New York Guilford Press

642 HESS ET AL

differences we will not discuss these data in detail However two things arenoteworthy First both men and women report lower probabilities that theywould react with a certain behaviour for example lsquolsquoto laughto get excitedrsquorsquothan with the emotion that corresponds to the behaviour (happiness) Thisfinding is not unexpected as individuals do not always express their emotionsoutwardly or may have developed idiosyncratic means of expressing certainemotions Second the profile data for the behaviours resemble strongly theemotional reactions reported For example for anger the highest means arefound for to hitto insultto criticise for to cryto isolate one self and for to stare

TABLE 3(Continued)

Men Women

Situation Mean SD Mean SD

Tremblefreeze 1206 2212 1227 2024Anger 1762 2980 1926 2950Hitinsultcriticise 129 543 221 720Disgust 1248 2569 1152 2402Grimacevomit 581 1642 351 1385Contempt 1603 2857 1464 2611Starelook hard at 129 495 136 485Shame 2667 3227 5375 3467Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 1952 2472 1769 2333Guilt 5071 3885 5753 3372Justify oneselfapologise 4484 3581 4286 3608

HappinessHappiness 8913 1981 9106 1471Laughget excited 5763 3420 6069 3283Serenity 2738t 3650 3906 3797Smilerelaxcontemplate 5451 3445 4647 3432Sadness 127 946 020 123Cryisolate oneself 040 318 029 141Fear 103 372 206 680Tremblefreeze 419t 1313 090 057Anger 032 252 000 000Hitinsultcriticise 000 000 013 114Disgust 048 378 000 000Grimacevomit 000 000 000 000Contempt 081 522 000 000Starelook hard at 355 1392 147 388Shame 111 764 000 000Withdrawlower onersquos headblush 718 1905 687 1859Guilt 270 1526 000 000Justify oneselfapologise 355 1535 090 340

Note Significant differences between men and women tp lt 1 p lt 05 p lt 01 p lt 001

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 629

to look hard at which correspond to anger sadness and contempt reactionsrespectively

However a number of differences between these two types of profiles canalso be observed For example for the emotional reaction profiles for anger andsadness the second highest mean is found for guilt whereas for the behaviouralreaction profiles for these emotions the second highest mean is found for shamebehaviours (to withdrawto lower onersquos headto blush) This findings may be dueto the general confusion between shame and guilt that has been observed forWestern cultures (see eg Wallbott amp Scherer 1994)

Sex differences To assess whether male and female participants differedwith regard to their expected emotional reactions and behaviours in the differentemotion eliciting situations profile analyses were conducted on the ratings foreach emotion situation All analyses and post-hoc tests were conducted at analpha level of 05 The results are shown in Table 4

TABLE 4Results of profile analyses on self-reported likelihood

of emotional reactionsbehaviours for men andwomen (Study 2)

Vignettes F df p

AngerReactions 295 8116 005Behaviours 183 8113 079

DisgustReactions 169 8115 107Behaviours 173 8116 099

FearReactions 330 8116 002Behaviours 390 8116 001

SadnessReactions 207 8116 044Behaviours 170 8115 105

GuiltReactions 186 8117 071Behaviours 130 8115 251

ShameReactions 215 8116 037Behaviours 70 8116 689

HappinessReactions 106 8116 397Behaviours 109 8116 376

630 HESS ET AL

Emotional reactions For all emotion situations except disgust andhappiness the emotional reactions profiles were nonparallel or marginallynonparallel (see Table 4) For the nonparallel profiles post-hoc tests revealedthat a similar pattern of sex differences emerged across the different emotionthemes For happiness and serenity there were either no significant differencesbetween men and women or men reported experiencing these emotions with ahigher probability than did women Conversely for sadness fear shame andguilt there were either no significant sex differences or women reported feelingthese emotions with a higher probability than did men For anger disgust andcontempt reactions no significant differences emerged

Emotional behaviour profiles Only the fear profile was significantlynonparallel (different) for men and women The profiles for anger and disgustwere marginally nonparallel and the remaining profiles were all parallel andcoincident Thus fewer significant differences between menrsquos and womenrsquosexpected behaviours in the situations described by the vignettes were found thanwas the case for the expected emotional reactions in Studies 1 and 2 Yet it isimportant to note that the probabilities reported for the behavioural profiles werelower overall and it is thus possible that this lack of differences is due to a lackof sensitivity of the measure

As postulated based on previous research (eg Crawford Clippax OnyxGault amp Benton 1992) as well as on the emotional reactions profile womenreport a higher probability of either crying or isolating oneself in an angersituation than do men Conversely and in accordance with both the literature onanger expression (see earlier) and the results from the emotional reactionsprofile men report it more likely to hitto insultto criticise than women thoughthis difference is not significant In addition they report that they aresignificantly more likely to stareto look hard (contempt) than do women abehaviour that could also be interpreted as aggressive when shown in responseto an insult

As regards the disgust situations men report that they are more likely tolaughto get excited This sex difference matches the finding for the emotionalreactions profile but was not found in Study 1 Finally for the fear situation menreport that they are more likely to hitto insultto criticise as well as to smiletorelaxto contemplate (serenity) than do women The emotional reactions profilefor fear from this study shows that men report a higher probability of reactingwith serenity but not with anger than do women As these behaviourscorrespond to a macho or cool demeanour in a threatening situation they fit thegeneral stereotype of masculine behaviour Conversely women report to bemore likely to trembleto freeze as well as to cryto isolate one self in fearsituations

In sum although many fewer sex differences reached significance whencomparing self-reported expected behaviours for men and women the pattern of

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 631

results is largely congruent with previous findings Specifically women reporteda higher probability of showing behaviours congruent with sadness and fear thandid men whereas men reported higher probabilities for anger and serenebehaviours In addition men reported a higher probability of showing acontempt behaviour in an anger situation yet the relevant behaviour (to staretolook hard) could be interpreted as aggressive in that context

How congruent are the findings fromStudies 1 and 2

As mentioned earlier not all significant differences found in Study 1 for theexpected reactions for men and women in general were also found for self-reports of expected reactions by men and women for themselves Yet as theresults for the two studies are based on different degrees of freedomsignificance levels cannot be directly compared To assess whether stereotypicaland self-reported sex differences were of similar magnitude we computed theeffect sizes for both studies Table 5 shows Cohenrsquos d for the post-hoc

TABLE 5Cohenrsquos d for sex differences in Studies 1 and 2

Study 1 Study 2

SituationEmotionalreactions

Emotionalreactions

Emotionalbehaviours

AngerHappiness 7023Serenity 7025Sadness 203 073 041Fear 123 030Anger 7055 7030Disgust 068Contempt 7026Shame 117 7035Guilt 129

DisgustHappiness 7032 7037 7047Serenity 7045 7026 7021Sadness 095 027Fear 189 033 033AngerDisgust 160 024 024Contempt 050Shame 062 7028 026Guilt 062 020

(Continued)

632 HESS ET AL

TABLE 5(Continued)

Study 1 Study 2

SituationEmotionalreactions

Emotionalreactions

Emotionalbehaviours

SadnessHappiness 7053Serenity 7032Sadness 184 022 024Fear 171 031Anger 7065 042Disgust 7030 7025Contempt 021Shame 020 7046 054Guilt 176 022 7033

FearHappiness 7021 7030Serenity 7026 7041 7052Sadness 189 055Fear 221 082 046Anger 7084 7043Disgust 067ContemptShame 049 7026Guilt 172 7025

ShameHappiness 7045 7023Serenity 7027 7020 7031Sadness 175 041Fear 128Anger 7069Disgust 065Contempt 054Shame 154 035Guilt 153 050

GuiltHappiness 7107 7035Serenity 7051Sadness 198 032 051Fear 162 029AngerDisgust 128Contempt 075Shame 178 051Guilt 183 020

633

comparisons for each emotion in the profile for the six negative emotionsituations across the two studies For Study 1 the effect sizes for the urban andthe rural sample were combined To facilitate the reading of the table onlydifferences for which d was at least 020 (ie equivalent to a small effect) areshown In general effect sizes for Study 1 are larger than those for Study 2 Foremotional reactions the expected differences between men and women were ofmedium (gt 050) to large (gt 080) size whereas for self-perceptions the expecteddifferences between men and women were small to medium in size

The most stable sex difference across the two studies was found for sadnessboth as a core emotion in sadness vignettes and as a secondary emotion That isfor all negative emotions the general stereotype describes women as reactingwith more sadness and women also perceive themselves as reacting with moresadness andor report more sadness behaviours Further women are expected toreact with (and they self-report) more shame and guilt reactionsbehaviours inshame and guilt situations However for the other negative emotions (angerdisgust sadness and fear) men report higher levels of shame reactions or shamebehaviours (but not both) Finally fear reactions and behaviours are described asmore likely for women in general and women perceive themselves as reactingwith more fear in disgust sadness fear and guilt situations

Another very stable sex difference across studies regards happiness andserenity reactions for negative emotion vignettes Men consistently are bothexpected to react with and self-report more happiness reactions as well ashappiness behaviours for disgust fear and shame vignettes To a lesser degreethis pattern also emerges for sadness and guilt vignettes As mentioned in thediscussion of Study 1 this may reflect differences in the value structure betweenmen and women

In sum a comparison of effect sizes shows considerable consistency acrossthe two studies Specifically noteworthy is the very consistent finding for boththe stereotypical beliefs and the self-reports with regard to sadness reactionswhich are considered as more likely for women than for men for all negativeemotion situations studied

However a number of differences between the general stereotypes and theself-perceptions also emerged specifically with regard to shame reactionsWhereas women are generally believed to be more likely to react with shameto negative emotion events the self-reported likelihood for shame as aconcomitant emotion is higher for men for all situations except for guilt(given the general confusion regarding these states observed in Westerncultures this may be due to shame being a core rather than a concomitantemotion for guilt scenarios) Yet self-reported shame behaviours are morelikely for women than for men in sadness and disgust situations A possibleexplanation is that men are actively trying to not show shame reactionsmdashtoconform to the general stereotypemdashbut are aware that they nonetheless arelikely to feel shame in those situations

634 HESS ET AL

To conclude the general stereotype and self-perceptions of emotionalreactions and behaviours suggest that women react with more sadness to all typesof negative emotion events Further the stereotypes and the self-perceptions arein agreement on menrsquos greater likelihood to react with happiness and serenity to avariety of negative emotions In contrast differences between the generalstereotypes and self-perceptions emerge for shame reactions with men reportingin situations when shame is a secondary emotion a higher likelihood of shamereactions but not necessarily shame behaviours than do women

STUDY 3

The results from Study 2 suggest that the stereotypical beliefs regarding menrsquosand womenrsquos emotional reactions and behaviours in a variety of emotion-inducing situations converge with self-perceptions of menrsquos and womenrsquosemotional reactions and behaviours in those same situations This finding isconsistent with the notion that autobiographic statements that requireparticipants to summarise over a number of related experiences may be biasedby stereotypical expectations (see eg Feldman-Barrett et al 1998) This leadsto the question of whether a similar overlap can also be found for narratives ofsingle specific emotional events from the participantsrsquo past If stereotypesindeed influence the way emotional events are reconstructed in a narrative wewould expect to find that women report more sadness events and express moresadness overall as well as more intense target emotions for all but anger eventsConversely we would expect men to report more situations involving anger aswell as experiencing more happiness and serenity overall

However as Study 3 is based on personal narratives and not on standardisedvignettes such a finding could simply be due to the fact that the emotionantecedent events in a real-life setting differ for men and women To assess thispossibility we decided to measure the emotion antecedent events by means of anappraisal questionnaire that assesses the participantsrsquo perception of the emotionantecedent situation To the degree that perceptions of emotion antecedents aresimilar for men and women while reported emotional reactions differ we canconclude that observed sex differences are not due to differences in theperception of the event per se For example if womenrsquos tendency to report moresadness were due to a difference in the perception of the emotion antecedentsituation we would expect women to report more often that they did not feel thatthey could do anything to change the situation or that they had to adapt to thesituation (as sadness is generally associated with the notion of irrevocable loss)

Overview

For this study we translated and adapted a questionnaire reported by Scherer(1988) that consists of two parts The first part invites the participants todescribe an event during which they experienced an emotion The second part

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 635

asks specific questions regarding the appraisal process We added a section inwhich we asked participants to complete an emotion profile for the event Toavoid the possibility that men and women would relate narratives from widelydifferent types of situations we asked participants to describe an event related tofamily interactions This class of situations should be readily accessible to allparticipants and ensure that emotional events involving human interactionpartners were reported

Allowing participants to choose the type of emotional events they report hasseveral advantages Most importantly we can assess what type of emotionalevents men and women choose to report spontaneously It also permitsparticipants to choose a salient event for which they can recollect theinformation necessary to respond to the appraisal questions On the other handthis approach is unlikely to result in a well-balanced distribution of emotiontopics thus making it difficult or impossible to analyse the data separately fordifferent emotion themes Yet in the context of the present study we were onlyinterested in sex differences in reports and not in absolute levels of responsesStudies 1 and 2 suggest that sex differences are very stable across all negativeemotions We therefore decided to allow participants to choose the emotiontheme and analysed the data collapsed across all negative emotion themes

Method

Participants A total of 171 students 87 men and 84 women with a meanage of 1862 years participated in this study Most of the participants (147) wererecruited from an ethnically homogenous junior college in the larger Montrealurban area (Cegep Lionel-Groulx Ste-Therese Quebec Canada) and partici-pated in groups An additional 24 participants were recruited individually

Procedure The experimenter explained that the study concerned emotionalevents in peoplersquos lives Participants were informed of their right to discontinueparticipation at any time and for any reason The experimenter then distributedthe questionnaires and responded to questions regarding the procedure The tasktook between 10 and 30 minutes Most of this time difference can be attributedto the amount of detail provided in the event description that ranged from acouple of words (eg birth of my daughter) to well over a page

Dependent measures The questionnaire consisted of four parts The firstpart was an open-ended question asking the participants to describe any eventinvolving their family life that led them to experience an emotion Sadnessshame anger guilt joy fear and disgust were provided as examples ofemotions Participants were asked to give a detailed description of the situationincluding the events that led up to it their reactions and those of others presentIn addition they were asked to identify the people involved with respect to their

636 HESS ET AL

relationship with them (eg my partner my sister etc) as well as to identify themain emotion theme of the story This served to ensure that the participantsbased their answers to the following questions on a specific event and not on aclass of similar events

Emotion description The second part of the questionnaire consisted ofquestions regarding when the event happened for how long they felt theemotion and the intensity of the core emotion identified as the emotion theme ofthe story Participants were also asked to indicate whether they tried to hide orcontrol their feelings and to what degree This part also contained the emotionprofile used in Studies 1 and 2 Using this measure participants were asked toindicate to what percentage they had felt each of the nine emotions from theprofile

Appraisal questionnaire A series of questions regarding the appraisal processwere used to assess the emotion antecedent events These questions weretranslated from the questionnaire reported by Scherer (1988) Specificallyparticipants were asked to what degree they had expected the situation to occurhow pleasant or unpleasant they considered the event whether the event helpedor hindered them in achieving their aims to what degree they considered that thesituation or the event that caused the emotion was unjust or unfair whether theevent was caused by their own or by someone elsersquos behaviour to what degreethey considered that the behaviour that caused the event would be judged asimproper or immoral by their acquaintances how the event affected theirfeelings about themselves such as their self-esteem or self-confidence andfinally to what degree the event changed their relationships with the peopleinvolved (all on negative-positive 7-point bipolar scales)

In addition participants were given a list of 11 specific potential causes of theevent (caused it myself natural causes act of god etc) They also evaluatedtheir ability to act upon or to cope with the event and its consequences using ascale involving 5 options The last part of the questionnaire consisted ofquestions regarding the participantsrsquo sex their age and whether they werecurrently seeing someone in a love-based relationship and if so for how long

Results

Of the 171 reported emotion events 147 (74 reported by men and 73 reported bywomen) concerned negative emotional events Of these a total of 62 weresadness events 22 were anger events and 11 were guilt events The remainingevents were distributed over a large number of negative emotions

As expected the very low frequency of reports for specific emotion themesmade separate analyses of reports of these events unfeasible We thereforedecided to perform analyses on the data summed over all negative emotionthemes The 24 events with positive emotion themes were obviously excludedfrom these analyses

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 637

Do women report more sadness events and men more anger events Toaddress this question a chi-square test was performed on the frequency withwhich men and women labeled the reported event as a sad versus an anger eventIn line with the results of Studies 1 and 2 we found men to report more angerevents and women to report more sadness events Specifically 14 men and 8women reported anger events and 25 men and 37 women reported sad events w2

= 355 p = 06 d = 42Do women report more intense core emotions than men For the intensity of

the core emotion experienced during the event women reported significantlyhigher levels (M = 593 SD = 101) than men (M = 554 SD = 123) t(145) =222 p = 028 d = 37

Do women and men report different levels of negative emotions across theemotion profile Figure 2 presents the emotion profiles separately for men andwomen An inspection of the profiles shows that overall men report morehappinessserenity whereas women report higher levels of all other emotionsThe profiles are nonparallel F(8 137) = 5877 p lt 001 Post-hoc analysesrevealed a significant sex difference in self-reported sadness with womenreporting higher levels than men To compare the sex differences in the profiles

Figure 2 Emotion profile for menrsquos and womenrsquos self-reported emotional reactions to negativeemotion events (Study 3)

638 HESS ET AL

found in this study with those from Studies 1 and 2 effect sizes were calculatedUsing the same cut-off point as previously (small effect size d = 020) only twodifferences were found to be stable across the three studies Men report higherlevels of happiness for negative emotion events (d = 7022) and women reporthigher levels of sadness (d = 043) As the latter difference may be due to thehigher frequency of reported sadness events by women we also verified whetherwomen report higher levels of sadness when sadness events are excluded fromthe analysis An inspection of the means revealed a marginally significantdifference in the same direction M = 6472 SD = 3247 and M = 5108 SD =3684 for women and men respectively t(83) = 181 p = 074 d = 40

Are there differences in appraisal patterns between men and women Asmentioned earlier the reported differences in emotional reactions could be dueto differences in the perception of the emotion antecedent events Yet nodifferences in appraisal patterns were found suggesting that emotion antecedentevents were perceived similarly In addition despite the more frequent and moreintense reports of sadness women did not report different coping styles thanmen and did not seem to feel more helpless (38 men vs 34 women report thisreaction) In fact women more frequently report that they felt able to lsquolsquoinfluencethe situation positivelyrsquorsquo (19 women vs 9 men report this reaction though thedifference is not significant)

Discussion

Study 3 extended the study of emotion stereotypes and self-perceptions based onvignettes to narratives of emotional events that the participants had in factexperienced themselves The goal of the study was to investigate whether thefindings from Studies 1 and 2 generalise to such recollections of personal eventsThe results strongly suggest this to be the case Women again report higherlevels of sadness for negative emotion events They also report more sad eventsin general Men on the other hand report more anger events as well as morehappiness for negative emotion events as was found in both Studies 1 and 2 Yetno reported differences in appraisal or coping emerged This suggests that theobserved differences in emotional reactions are not due to a bias in the appraisalprocess nor to an inability to act upon the event

If emotion antecedents do not differ why are differences in emotionalreactions reported We suggest that such differences represent an influence ofthe general emotion stereotype on the narrative reconstruction of a personalevent This conclusion is based on the observation of a null effect and thus opento the critique that the present study lacked the power necessary to detect realdifferences in appraisal between men and women To assess this critique wecalculated the absolute mean effect size for the interval-scaled appraisalquestions to be d = 015 To achieve 80 power a sample of 1100 participantswould be needed These data underscore the very slim differences in appraisals

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 639

between men and women making it highly unlikely that the effects observed inthis study are mediated by a difference in appraisal and thus by a difference inthe perception of the underlying event

CONCLUSIONS

The present series of studies had the goal to assess general emotion stereotypesand their influence on self-perceptions of emotional reactions by men andwomen We wanted to both describe these stereotypes in more detail with regardnot only to the modal emotion for a specific event (such as sadness reactions to aloss) but also with regard to the secondary emotions present in these situationsFurther we wanted to assess to what degree such expectations for men andwomen in general are endorsed by individuals for themselves as well as whetherthey would be spontaneously reported when relating a personally experiencedevent

Two gender differences were found to be stable across all three experimentalparadigms Women are expected to be more likely to react with sadness in allnegative emotion situations they expect themselves to be more likely to reactwith sadness as well as to cry and to withdraw more and finally women reportmore sadness in personal events In contrast men are expected to react withmore happinessserenity during negative emotional situations they expectthemselves to react more frequently this way as well as to laugh and smile moreand to be more relaxed They also tend to report more happiness whendescribing negative personal events

Not all general emotion stereotypes were found in the self-perceptionsstudied in Studies 2 and 3 Specifically according to Study 1 women areexpected to be more likely to react with shame and guilt in all negative emotionsituations Yet women did not expect to do so for themselves in situations otherthan shame and guilt situations and in fact men reported to be more likely toreact with shame in a variety of situations Further men and women did notreport any differences with regard to experiences of shame and guilt during thepersonal events

Study 3 included an appraisal questionnaire to address the question whetherthe self-reported differences in emotionality between men and women are due todifferences in the appraisal of the emotion antecedent events or rather to theinfluence of the prevalent norms No differences in appraisals were detectedsuggesting that the self-reported differences may be due to the normative forcesof the general stereotype rather than to appraisal differences

It may be argued that the Study 3 is based on recollections of past events andthat self-reports of emotional experiences represent after the fact reconstructionsthat differ from the actually experienced emotions during the event (seeParkinson amp Manstead 1993) A related argument may be made for Study 2where participants had to estimate the likelihood of their emotional reactions to

640 HESS ET AL

hypothetical events (even though the latter were chosen to be common everydayevents) This may well be true Yet the question remains why did men andwomen reconstruct the events differently in terms of their emotional reactionsThe answer would then be that the prevalent emotion stereotype which islargely endorsed by the population studied influenced this reconstruction Yetas peoplesrsquo sense of self depends on their past histories this would imply thatreconstructions of emotional events in line with emotion stereotypes mayeventually lead individuals to conform more closely to these stereotypes as theybecome more and more part of their emotional history and eventually of theiremotional self

Manuscript received 30 May 1997Revised manuscript received 23 February 2000

REFERENCES

Adams S Kuebli J Boyle PA amp Fivush R (1995) Gender differences in parent-childconversations about past emotions A longitudinal investigation Sex Roles 33 309ndash323

Allen JG amp Haccoun DM (1976) Sex differences in emotionality A multidimensional approachHuman Relations 29 711ndash722

Averill JR (1997) The emotions An integrative approach In R Hogan JA Johnson amp SRBriggs (Eds) Handbook of personality psychology (pp 513ndash541) San Diego CA AcademicPress

Birnbaum DW (1983) Preschoolersrsquo stereotypes about sex differences in emotionality Areaffirmation Journal of Genetic Psychology 143 139ndash140

Briton NJ amp Hall JA (1995) Gender-based expectancies and observer judgements of smilingJournal of Nonverbal Behavior 19 49ndash65

Brody LR amp Hall JA (1993) Gender and emotion In M Lewis amp JM Haviland (Eds)Handbook of emotions (pp 447-460) New York Guilford Press

Crawford J Clippax S Onyx J Gault U amp Benton P (1992) Emotion and genderConstructing meaning from memory London Sage

Dunn J Bretherton I amp Munn P (1987) Conversations about feeling states between mothers andtheir children Developmental Psychology 23 132ndash139

Eagly AH amp Mladinic A (1989) Gender stereotypes and attitudes toward women and menPersonality and Social Psychology Bulletin 15 543ndash558

Ekman P amp Friesen W (1986) A new pan-cultural facial expression of emotion Motivation andEmotion 10 159ndash168

Feldman-Barrett L Robin L Pietromonaco PR amp Eysell KM (1998) Are women the moreemotional sex Evidence from emotional experiences in social context Cognition and Emotion12 555ndash578

Fernandez-Dols J-M amp Ruiz-Belda M-A (1995) Are smiles a sign of happiness Gold medalwinners at the Olympic Games Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 69 1113ndash1119

Fischer A (1993) Sex differences in emotionality Fact or stereotype Feminism and Psychology 3303ndash318

Fivush R (1989) Exploring differences in the emotional content of mother child conversationsabout the past Sex Roles 20 675ndash691

Frank MG amp Ekman P (1993) Not all smiles are created equal The differences betweenenjoyment and nonenjoymen t smiles [Special Issue Current issues in psychological humorresearch] Humor International Journal of Humor Research 6 9ndash26

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 641

Gallois C (1994) Group membership social rules and power A social psychologica l perspectiveon emotional communication Journal of Pragmatics 22 301ndash324

Hall JA (1984) Nonverbal sex differences Communication accuracy and expressive styleBaltimore MD Johns Hopkins University Press

Izard C (1972) Patterns of emotions A new analysis of anxiety and depression New YorkAcademic Press

Jussim L Milbourn M amp Nelson W (1991) Emotional openness Sex-role stereotypes and self-perceptions Representative Research in Social Psychology 19 35ndash52

Kirouac G amp Hess U (1999) Group membership and the decoding of nonverbal behavior In PPhilippot R Feldman amp E Coats (Eds) The social context of nonverbal behavior (pp 182ndash210) New York Cambridge University Press

Kring AM amp Gordon AH (1998) Sex differences in emotion Expression experience andphysiology Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74 686ndash703

LaFrance M amp Banaji M (1992) Toward a reconsideration of the gender-emotion relationship InMS Clark (Ed) Emotion and social behavior Review of personality and social psychology(Vol 14 pp 178ndash201) Newbury Park CA Sage

LaFrance M amp Hecht MA (1995) Why smiles generate leniency Personality and SocialPsychology Bulletin 21 207ndash214

Lazarus RS (1991) Emotion and adaptation Oxford UK Oxford University PressParkinson B amp Manstead ASR (1993) Making sense of emotion in stories and social life

Cognition and Emotion 7 295ndash323Plutchik R (1980) Emotion A psychoevolutionar y synthesis New York Harper amp RowRime B Mesquita B Philippot P amp Boca S (1991) Beyond the emotional event Six studies on

the social sharing of emotion Cognition and Emotion 5 435ndash465Scherer KR (1988) Appendix C Questionnaire used in the International Survey on Emotion

Antecedents and Reactions (ISEAR) In KR Scherer (Ed) Facets of emotion Recent researchHillsdale NJ Erlbaum

Sherman JW amp Bessenhoff GR (1999) Stereotypes as source monitoring cues On theinteraction between episodic and semantic memory Psychological Science 10 106ndash110

Stoppard JM amp Gruchy CD (1993) Gender context and expression of positive emotionPersonality and Social Psychology Bulletin 19 143ndash150

Tucker JS amp Riggio RE (1988) The role of social skills in encoding posed and spontaneousfacial expressions Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 12 87ndash97

Wallbott HG amp Scherer KR (1994) Cultural determinants in experiencing shame and guilt InJune Price Tangney amp Kurt W Fischer (Eds) Self conscious emotions The psychology of shameand guilt embarrasment and pride (pp 465ndash487) New York Guilford Press

642 HESS ET AL

to look hard at which correspond to anger sadness and contempt reactionsrespectively

However a number of differences between these two types of profiles canalso be observed For example for the emotional reaction profiles for anger andsadness the second highest mean is found for guilt whereas for the behaviouralreaction profiles for these emotions the second highest mean is found for shamebehaviours (to withdrawto lower onersquos headto blush) This findings may be dueto the general confusion between shame and guilt that has been observed forWestern cultures (see eg Wallbott amp Scherer 1994)

Sex differences To assess whether male and female participants differedwith regard to their expected emotional reactions and behaviours in the differentemotion eliciting situations profile analyses were conducted on the ratings foreach emotion situation All analyses and post-hoc tests were conducted at analpha level of 05 The results are shown in Table 4

TABLE 4Results of profile analyses on self-reported likelihood

of emotional reactionsbehaviours for men andwomen (Study 2)

Vignettes F df p

AngerReactions 295 8116 005Behaviours 183 8113 079

DisgustReactions 169 8115 107Behaviours 173 8116 099

FearReactions 330 8116 002Behaviours 390 8116 001

SadnessReactions 207 8116 044Behaviours 170 8115 105

GuiltReactions 186 8117 071Behaviours 130 8115 251

ShameReactions 215 8116 037Behaviours 70 8116 689

HappinessReactions 106 8116 397Behaviours 109 8116 376

630 HESS ET AL

Emotional reactions For all emotion situations except disgust andhappiness the emotional reactions profiles were nonparallel or marginallynonparallel (see Table 4) For the nonparallel profiles post-hoc tests revealedthat a similar pattern of sex differences emerged across the different emotionthemes For happiness and serenity there were either no significant differencesbetween men and women or men reported experiencing these emotions with ahigher probability than did women Conversely for sadness fear shame andguilt there were either no significant sex differences or women reported feelingthese emotions with a higher probability than did men For anger disgust andcontempt reactions no significant differences emerged

Emotional behaviour profiles Only the fear profile was significantlynonparallel (different) for men and women The profiles for anger and disgustwere marginally nonparallel and the remaining profiles were all parallel andcoincident Thus fewer significant differences between menrsquos and womenrsquosexpected behaviours in the situations described by the vignettes were found thanwas the case for the expected emotional reactions in Studies 1 and 2 Yet it isimportant to note that the probabilities reported for the behavioural profiles werelower overall and it is thus possible that this lack of differences is due to a lackof sensitivity of the measure

As postulated based on previous research (eg Crawford Clippax OnyxGault amp Benton 1992) as well as on the emotional reactions profile womenreport a higher probability of either crying or isolating oneself in an angersituation than do men Conversely and in accordance with both the literature onanger expression (see earlier) and the results from the emotional reactionsprofile men report it more likely to hitto insultto criticise than women thoughthis difference is not significant In addition they report that they aresignificantly more likely to stareto look hard (contempt) than do women abehaviour that could also be interpreted as aggressive when shown in responseto an insult

As regards the disgust situations men report that they are more likely tolaughto get excited This sex difference matches the finding for the emotionalreactions profile but was not found in Study 1 Finally for the fear situation menreport that they are more likely to hitto insultto criticise as well as to smiletorelaxto contemplate (serenity) than do women The emotional reactions profilefor fear from this study shows that men report a higher probability of reactingwith serenity but not with anger than do women As these behaviourscorrespond to a macho or cool demeanour in a threatening situation they fit thegeneral stereotype of masculine behaviour Conversely women report to bemore likely to trembleto freeze as well as to cryto isolate one self in fearsituations

In sum although many fewer sex differences reached significance whencomparing self-reported expected behaviours for men and women the pattern of

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 631

results is largely congruent with previous findings Specifically women reporteda higher probability of showing behaviours congruent with sadness and fear thandid men whereas men reported higher probabilities for anger and serenebehaviours In addition men reported a higher probability of showing acontempt behaviour in an anger situation yet the relevant behaviour (to staretolook hard) could be interpreted as aggressive in that context

How congruent are the findings fromStudies 1 and 2

As mentioned earlier not all significant differences found in Study 1 for theexpected reactions for men and women in general were also found for self-reports of expected reactions by men and women for themselves Yet as theresults for the two studies are based on different degrees of freedomsignificance levels cannot be directly compared To assess whether stereotypicaland self-reported sex differences were of similar magnitude we computed theeffect sizes for both studies Table 5 shows Cohenrsquos d for the post-hoc

TABLE 5Cohenrsquos d for sex differences in Studies 1 and 2

Study 1 Study 2

SituationEmotionalreactions

Emotionalreactions

Emotionalbehaviours

AngerHappiness 7023Serenity 7025Sadness 203 073 041Fear 123 030Anger 7055 7030Disgust 068Contempt 7026Shame 117 7035Guilt 129

DisgustHappiness 7032 7037 7047Serenity 7045 7026 7021Sadness 095 027Fear 189 033 033AngerDisgust 160 024 024Contempt 050Shame 062 7028 026Guilt 062 020

(Continued)

632 HESS ET AL

TABLE 5(Continued)

Study 1 Study 2

SituationEmotionalreactions

Emotionalreactions

Emotionalbehaviours

SadnessHappiness 7053Serenity 7032Sadness 184 022 024Fear 171 031Anger 7065 042Disgust 7030 7025Contempt 021Shame 020 7046 054Guilt 176 022 7033

FearHappiness 7021 7030Serenity 7026 7041 7052Sadness 189 055Fear 221 082 046Anger 7084 7043Disgust 067ContemptShame 049 7026Guilt 172 7025

ShameHappiness 7045 7023Serenity 7027 7020 7031Sadness 175 041Fear 128Anger 7069Disgust 065Contempt 054Shame 154 035Guilt 153 050

GuiltHappiness 7107 7035Serenity 7051Sadness 198 032 051Fear 162 029AngerDisgust 128Contempt 075Shame 178 051Guilt 183 020

633

comparisons for each emotion in the profile for the six negative emotionsituations across the two studies For Study 1 the effect sizes for the urban andthe rural sample were combined To facilitate the reading of the table onlydifferences for which d was at least 020 (ie equivalent to a small effect) areshown In general effect sizes for Study 1 are larger than those for Study 2 Foremotional reactions the expected differences between men and women were ofmedium (gt 050) to large (gt 080) size whereas for self-perceptions the expecteddifferences between men and women were small to medium in size

The most stable sex difference across the two studies was found for sadnessboth as a core emotion in sadness vignettes and as a secondary emotion That isfor all negative emotions the general stereotype describes women as reactingwith more sadness and women also perceive themselves as reacting with moresadness andor report more sadness behaviours Further women are expected toreact with (and they self-report) more shame and guilt reactionsbehaviours inshame and guilt situations However for the other negative emotions (angerdisgust sadness and fear) men report higher levels of shame reactions or shamebehaviours (but not both) Finally fear reactions and behaviours are described asmore likely for women in general and women perceive themselves as reactingwith more fear in disgust sadness fear and guilt situations

Another very stable sex difference across studies regards happiness andserenity reactions for negative emotion vignettes Men consistently are bothexpected to react with and self-report more happiness reactions as well ashappiness behaviours for disgust fear and shame vignettes To a lesser degreethis pattern also emerges for sadness and guilt vignettes As mentioned in thediscussion of Study 1 this may reflect differences in the value structure betweenmen and women

In sum a comparison of effect sizes shows considerable consistency acrossthe two studies Specifically noteworthy is the very consistent finding for boththe stereotypical beliefs and the self-reports with regard to sadness reactionswhich are considered as more likely for women than for men for all negativeemotion situations studied

However a number of differences between the general stereotypes and theself-perceptions also emerged specifically with regard to shame reactionsWhereas women are generally believed to be more likely to react with shameto negative emotion events the self-reported likelihood for shame as aconcomitant emotion is higher for men for all situations except for guilt(given the general confusion regarding these states observed in Westerncultures this may be due to shame being a core rather than a concomitantemotion for guilt scenarios) Yet self-reported shame behaviours are morelikely for women than for men in sadness and disgust situations A possibleexplanation is that men are actively trying to not show shame reactionsmdashtoconform to the general stereotypemdashbut are aware that they nonetheless arelikely to feel shame in those situations

634 HESS ET AL

To conclude the general stereotype and self-perceptions of emotionalreactions and behaviours suggest that women react with more sadness to all typesof negative emotion events Further the stereotypes and the self-perceptions arein agreement on menrsquos greater likelihood to react with happiness and serenity to avariety of negative emotions In contrast differences between the generalstereotypes and self-perceptions emerge for shame reactions with men reportingin situations when shame is a secondary emotion a higher likelihood of shamereactions but not necessarily shame behaviours than do women

STUDY 3

The results from Study 2 suggest that the stereotypical beliefs regarding menrsquosand womenrsquos emotional reactions and behaviours in a variety of emotion-inducing situations converge with self-perceptions of menrsquos and womenrsquosemotional reactions and behaviours in those same situations This finding isconsistent with the notion that autobiographic statements that requireparticipants to summarise over a number of related experiences may be biasedby stereotypical expectations (see eg Feldman-Barrett et al 1998) This leadsto the question of whether a similar overlap can also be found for narratives ofsingle specific emotional events from the participantsrsquo past If stereotypesindeed influence the way emotional events are reconstructed in a narrative wewould expect to find that women report more sadness events and express moresadness overall as well as more intense target emotions for all but anger eventsConversely we would expect men to report more situations involving anger aswell as experiencing more happiness and serenity overall

However as Study 3 is based on personal narratives and not on standardisedvignettes such a finding could simply be due to the fact that the emotionantecedent events in a real-life setting differ for men and women To assess thispossibility we decided to measure the emotion antecedent events by means of anappraisal questionnaire that assesses the participantsrsquo perception of the emotionantecedent situation To the degree that perceptions of emotion antecedents aresimilar for men and women while reported emotional reactions differ we canconclude that observed sex differences are not due to differences in theperception of the event per se For example if womenrsquos tendency to report moresadness were due to a difference in the perception of the emotion antecedentsituation we would expect women to report more often that they did not feel thatthey could do anything to change the situation or that they had to adapt to thesituation (as sadness is generally associated with the notion of irrevocable loss)

Overview

For this study we translated and adapted a questionnaire reported by Scherer(1988) that consists of two parts The first part invites the participants todescribe an event during which they experienced an emotion The second part

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 635

asks specific questions regarding the appraisal process We added a section inwhich we asked participants to complete an emotion profile for the event Toavoid the possibility that men and women would relate narratives from widelydifferent types of situations we asked participants to describe an event related tofamily interactions This class of situations should be readily accessible to allparticipants and ensure that emotional events involving human interactionpartners were reported

Allowing participants to choose the type of emotional events they report hasseveral advantages Most importantly we can assess what type of emotionalevents men and women choose to report spontaneously It also permitsparticipants to choose a salient event for which they can recollect theinformation necessary to respond to the appraisal questions On the other handthis approach is unlikely to result in a well-balanced distribution of emotiontopics thus making it difficult or impossible to analyse the data separately fordifferent emotion themes Yet in the context of the present study we were onlyinterested in sex differences in reports and not in absolute levels of responsesStudies 1 and 2 suggest that sex differences are very stable across all negativeemotions We therefore decided to allow participants to choose the emotiontheme and analysed the data collapsed across all negative emotion themes

Method

Participants A total of 171 students 87 men and 84 women with a meanage of 1862 years participated in this study Most of the participants (147) wererecruited from an ethnically homogenous junior college in the larger Montrealurban area (Cegep Lionel-Groulx Ste-Therese Quebec Canada) and partici-pated in groups An additional 24 participants were recruited individually

Procedure The experimenter explained that the study concerned emotionalevents in peoplersquos lives Participants were informed of their right to discontinueparticipation at any time and for any reason The experimenter then distributedthe questionnaires and responded to questions regarding the procedure The tasktook between 10 and 30 minutes Most of this time difference can be attributedto the amount of detail provided in the event description that ranged from acouple of words (eg birth of my daughter) to well over a page

Dependent measures The questionnaire consisted of four parts The firstpart was an open-ended question asking the participants to describe any eventinvolving their family life that led them to experience an emotion Sadnessshame anger guilt joy fear and disgust were provided as examples ofemotions Participants were asked to give a detailed description of the situationincluding the events that led up to it their reactions and those of others presentIn addition they were asked to identify the people involved with respect to their

636 HESS ET AL

relationship with them (eg my partner my sister etc) as well as to identify themain emotion theme of the story This served to ensure that the participantsbased their answers to the following questions on a specific event and not on aclass of similar events

Emotion description The second part of the questionnaire consisted ofquestions regarding when the event happened for how long they felt theemotion and the intensity of the core emotion identified as the emotion theme ofthe story Participants were also asked to indicate whether they tried to hide orcontrol their feelings and to what degree This part also contained the emotionprofile used in Studies 1 and 2 Using this measure participants were asked toindicate to what percentage they had felt each of the nine emotions from theprofile

Appraisal questionnaire A series of questions regarding the appraisal processwere used to assess the emotion antecedent events These questions weretranslated from the questionnaire reported by Scherer (1988) Specificallyparticipants were asked to what degree they had expected the situation to occurhow pleasant or unpleasant they considered the event whether the event helpedor hindered them in achieving their aims to what degree they considered that thesituation or the event that caused the emotion was unjust or unfair whether theevent was caused by their own or by someone elsersquos behaviour to what degreethey considered that the behaviour that caused the event would be judged asimproper or immoral by their acquaintances how the event affected theirfeelings about themselves such as their self-esteem or self-confidence andfinally to what degree the event changed their relationships with the peopleinvolved (all on negative-positive 7-point bipolar scales)

In addition participants were given a list of 11 specific potential causes of theevent (caused it myself natural causes act of god etc) They also evaluatedtheir ability to act upon or to cope with the event and its consequences using ascale involving 5 options The last part of the questionnaire consisted ofquestions regarding the participantsrsquo sex their age and whether they werecurrently seeing someone in a love-based relationship and if so for how long

Results

Of the 171 reported emotion events 147 (74 reported by men and 73 reported bywomen) concerned negative emotional events Of these a total of 62 weresadness events 22 were anger events and 11 were guilt events The remainingevents were distributed over a large number of negative emotions

As expected the very low frequency of reports for specific emotion themesmade separate analyses of reports of these events unfeasible We thereforedecided to perform analyses on the data summed over all negative emotionthemes The 24 events with positive emotion themes were obviously excludedfrom these analyses

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 637

Do women report more sadness events and men more anger events Toaddress this question a chi-square test was performed on the frequency withwhich men and women labeled the reported event as a sad versus an anger eventIn line with the results of Studies 1 and 2 we found men to report more angerevents and women to report more sadness events Specifically 14 men and 8women reported anger events and 25 men and 37 women reported sad events w2

= 355 p = 06 d = 42Do women report more intense core emotions than men For the intensity of

the core emotion experienced during the event women reported significantlyhigher levels (M = 593 SD = 101) than men (M = 554 SD = 123) t(145) =222 p = 028 d = 37

Do women and men report different levels of negative emotions across theemotion profile Figure 2 presents the emotion profiles separately for men andwomen An inspection of the profiles shows that overall men report morehappinessserenity whereas women report higher levels of all other emotionsThe profiles are nonparallel F(8 137) = 5877 p lt 001 Post-hoc analysesrevealed a significant sex difference in self-reported sadness with womenreporting higher levels than men To compare the sex differences in the profiles

Figure 2 Emotion profile for menrsquos and womenrsquos self-reported emotional reactions to negativeemotion events (Study 3)

638 HESS ET AL

found in this study with those from Studies 1 and 2 effect sizes were calculatedUsing the same cut-off point as previously (small effect size d = 020) only twodifferences were found to be stable across the three studies Men report higherlevels of happiness for negative emotion events (d = 7022) and women reporthigher levels of sadness (d = 043) As the latter difference may be due to thehigher frequency of reported sadness events by women we also verified whetherwomen report higher levels of sadness when sadness events are excluded fromthe analysis An inspection of the means revealed a marginally significantdifference in the same direction M = 6472 SD = 3247 and M = 5108 SD =3684 for women and men respectively t(83) = 181 p = 074 d = 40

Are there differences in appraisal patterns between men and women Asmentioned earlier the reported differences in emotional reactions could be dueto differences in the perception of the emotion antecedent events Yet nodifferences in appraisal patterns were found suggesting that emotion antecedentevents were perceived similarly In addition despite the more frequent and moreintense reports of sadness women did not report different coping styles thanmen and did not seem to feel more helpless (38 men vs 34 women report thisreaction) In fact women more frequently report that they felt able to lsquolsquoinfluencethe situation positivelyrsquorsquo (19 women vs 9 men report this reaction though thedifference is not significant)

Discussion

Study 3 extended the study of emotion stereotypes and self-perceptions based onvignettes to narratives of emotional events that the participants had in factexperienced themselves The goal of the study was to investigate whether thefindings from Studies 1 and 2 generalise to such recollections of personal eventsThe results strongly suggest this to be the case Women again report higherlevels of sadness for negative emotion events They also report more sad eventsin general Men on the other hand report more anger events as well as morehappiness for negative emotion events as was found in both Studies 1 and 2 Yetno reported differences in appraisal or coping emerged This suggests that theobserved differences in emotional reactions are not due to a bias in the appraisalprocess nor to an inability to act upon the event

If emotion antecedents do not differ why are differences in emotionalreactions reported We suggest that such differences represent an influence ofthe general emotion stereotype on the narrative reconstruction of a personalevent This conclusion is based on the observation of a null effect and thus opento the critique that the present study lacked the power necessary to detect realdifferences in appraisal between men and women To assess this critique wecalculated the absolute mean effect size for the interval-scaled appraisalquestions to be d = 015 To achieve 80 power a sample of 1100 participantswould be needed These data underscore the very slim differences in appraisals

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 639

between men and women making it highly unlikely that the effects observed inthis study are mediated by a difference in appraisal and thus by a difference inthe perception of the underlying event

CONCLUSIONS

The present series of studies had the goal to assess general emotion stereotypesand their influence on self-perceptions of emotional reactions by men andwomen We wanted to both describe these stereotypes in more detail with regardnot only to the modal emotion for a specific event (such as sadness reactions to aloss) but also with regard to the secondary emotions present in these situationsFurther we wanted to assess to what degree such expectations for men andwomen in general are endorsed by individuals for themselves as well as whetherthey would be spontaneously reported when relating a personally experiencedevent

Two gender differences were found to be stable across all three experimentalparadigms Women are expected to be more likely to react with sadness in allnegative emotion situations they expect themselves to be more likely to reactwith sadness as well as to cry and to withdraw more and finally women reportmore sadness in personal events In contrast men are expected to react withmore happinessserenity during negative emotional situations they expectthemselves to react more frequently this way as well as to laugh and smile moreand to be more relaxed They also tend to report more happiness whendescribing negative personal events

Not all general emotion stereotypes were found in the self-perceptionsstudied in Studies 2 and 3 Specifically according to Study 1 women areexpected to be more likely to react with shame and guilt in all negative emotionsituations Yet women did not expect to do so for themselves in situations otherthan shame and guilt situations and in fact men reported to be more likely toreact with shame in a variety of situations Further men and women did notreport any differences with regard to experiences of shame and guilt during thepersonal events

Study 3 included an appraisal questionnaire to address the question whetherthe self-reported differences in emotionality between men and women are due todifferences in the appraisal of the emotion antecedent events or rather to theinfluence of the prevalent norms No differences in appraisals were detectedsuggesting that the self-reported differences may be due to the normative forcesof the general stereotype rather than to appraisal differences

It may be argued that the Study 3 is based on recollections of past events andthat self-reports of emotional experiences represent after the fact reconstructionsthat differ from the actually experienced emotions during the event (seeParkinson amp Manstead 1993) A related argument may be made for Study 2where participants had to estimate the likelihood of their emotional reactions to

640 HESS ET AL

hypothetical events (even though the latter were chosen to be common everydayevents) This may well be true Yet the question remains why did men andwomen reconstruct the events differently in terms of their emotional reactionsThe answer would then be that the prevalent emotion stereotype which islargely endorsed by the population studied influenced this reconstruction Yetas peoplesrsquo sense of self depends on their past histories this would imply thatreconstructions of emotional events in line with emotion stereotypes mayeventually lead individuals to conform more closely to these stereotypes as theybecome more and more part of their emotional history and eventually of theiremotional self

Manuscript received 30 May 1997Revised manuscript received 23 February 2000

REFERENCES

Adams S Kuebli J Boyle PA amp Fivush R (1995) Gender differences in parent-childconversations about past emotions A longitudinal investigation Sex Roles 33 309ndash323

Allen JG amp Haccoun DM (1976) Sex differences in emotionality A multidimensional approachHuman Relations 29 711ndash722

Averill JR (1997) The emotions An integrative approach In R Hogan JA Johnson amp SRBriggs (Eds) Handbook of personality psychology (pp 513ndash541) San Diego CA AcademicPress

Birnbaum DW (1983) Preschoolersrsquo stereotypes about sex differences in emotionality Areaffirmation Journal of Genetic Psychology 143 139ndash140

Briton NJ amp Hall JA (1995) Gender-based expectancies and observer judgements of smilingJournal of Nonverbal Behavior 19 49ndash65

Brody LR amp Hall JA (1993) Gender and emotion In M Lewis amp JM Haviland (Eds)Handbook of emotions (pp 447-460) New York Guilford Press

Crawford J Clippax S Onyx J Gault U amp Benton P (1992) Emotion and genderConstructing meaning from memory London Sage

Dunn J Bretherton I amp Munn P (1987) Conversations about feeling states between mothers andtheir children Developmental Psychology 23 132ndash139

Eagly AH amp Mladinic A (1989) Gender stereotypes and attitudes toward women and menPersonality and Social Psychology Bulletin 15 543ndash558

Ekman P amp Friesen W (1986) A new pan-cultural facial expression of emotion Motivation andEmotion 10 159ndash168

Feldman-Barrett L Robin L Pietromonaco PR amp Eysell KM (1998) Are women the moreemotional sex Evidence from emotional experiences in social context Cognition and Emotion12 555ndash578

Fernandez-Dols J-M amp Ruiz-Belda M-A (1995) Are smiles a sign of happiness Gold medalwinners at the Olympic Games Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 69 1113ndash1119

Fischer A (1993) Sex differences in emotionality Fact or stereotype Feminism and Psychology 3303ndash318

Fivush R (1989) Exploring differences in the emotional content of mother child conversationsabout the past Sex Roles 20 675ndash691

Frank MG amp Ekman P (1993) Not all smiles are created equal The differences betweenenjoyment and nonenjoymen t smiles [Special Issue Current issues in psychological humorresearch] Humor International Journal of Humor Research 6 9ndash26

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 641

Gallois C (1994) Group membership social rules and power A social psychologica l perspectiveon emotional communication Journal of Pragmatics 22 301ndash324

Hall JA (1984) Nonverbal sex differences Communication accuracy and expressive styleBaltimore MD Johns Hopkins University Press

Izard C (1972) Patterns of emotions A new analysis of anxiety and depression New YorkAcademic Press

Jussim L Milbourn M amp Nelson W (1991) Emotional openness Sex-role stereotypes and self-perceptions Representative Research in Social Psychology 19 35ndash52

Kirouac G amp Hess U (1999) Group membership and the decoding of nonverbal behavior In PPhilippot R Feldman amp E Coats (Eds) The social context of nonverbal behavior (pp 182ndash210) New York Cambridge University Press

Kring AM amp Gordon AH (1998) Sex differences in emotion Expression experience andphysiology Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74 686ndash703

LaFrance M amp Banaji M (1992) Toward a reconsideration of the gender-emotion relationship InMS Clark (Ed) Emotion and social behavior Review of personality and social psychology(Vol 14 pp 178ndash201) Newbury Park CA Sage

LaFrance M amp Hecht MA (1995) Why smiles generate leniency Personality and SocialPsychology Bulletin 21 207ndash214

Lazarus RS (1991) Emotion and adaptation Oxford UK Oxford University PressParkinson B amp Manstead ASR (1993) Making sense of emotion in stories and social life

Cognition and Emotion 7 295ndash323Plutchik R (1980) Emotion A psychoevolutionar y synthesis New York Harper amp RowRime B Mesquita B Philippot P amp Boca S (1991) Beyond the emotional event Six studies on

the social sharing of emotion Cognition and Emotion 5 435ndash465Scherer KR (1988) Appendix C Questionnaire used in the International Survey on Emotion

Antecedents and Reactions (ISEAR) In KR Scherer (Ed) Facets of emotion Recent researchHillsdale NJ Erlbaum

Sherman JW amp Bessenhoff GR (1999) Stereotypes as source monitoring cues On theinteraction between episodic and semantic memory Psychological Science 10 106ndash110

Stoppard JM amp Gruchy CD (1993) Gender context and expression of positive emotionPersonality and Social Psychology Bulletin 19 143ndash150

Tucker JS amp Riggio RE (1988) The role of social skills in encoding posed and spontaneousfacial expressions Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 12 87ndash97

Wallbott HG amp Scherer KR (1994) Cultural determinants in experiencing shame and guilt InJune Price Tangney amp Kurt W Fischer (Eds) Self conscious emotions The psychology of shameand guilt embarrasment and pride (pp 465ndash487) New York Guilford Press

642 HESS ET AL

Emotional reactions For all emotion situations except disgust andhappiness the emotional reactions profiles were nonparallel or marginallynonparallel (see Table 4) For the nonparallel profiles post-hoc tests revealedthat a similar pattern of sex differences emerged across the different emotionthemes For happiness and serenity there were either no significant differencesbetween men and women or men reported experiencing these emotions with ahigher probability than did women Conversely for sadness fear shame andguilt there were either no significant sex differences or women reported feelingthese emotions with a higher probability than did men For anger disgust andcontempt reactions no significant differences emerged

Emotional behaviour profiles Only the fear profile was significantlynonparallel (different) for men and women The profiles for anger and disgustwere marginally nonparallel and the remaining profiles were all parallel andcoincident Thus fewer significant differences between menrsquos and womenrsquosexpected behaviours in the situations described by the vignettes were found thanwas the case for the expected emotional reactions in Studies 1 and 2 Yet it isimportant to note that the probabilities reported for the behavioural profiles werelower overall and it is thus possible that this lack of differences is due to a lackof sensitivity of the measure

As postulated based on previous research (eg Crawford Clippax OnyxGault amp Benton 1992) as well as on the emotional reactions profile womenreport a higher probability of either crying or isolating oneself in an angersituation than do men Conversely and in accordance with both the literature onanger expression (see earlier) and the results from the emotional reactionsprofile men report it more likely to hitto insultto criticise than women thoughthis difference is not significant In addition they report that they aresignificantly more likely to stareto look hard (contempt) than do women abehaviour that could also be interpreted as aggressive when shown in responseto an insult

As regards the disgust situations men report that they are more likely tolaughto get excited This sex difference matches the finding for the emotionalreactions profile but was not found in Study 1 Finally for the fear situation menreport that they are more likely to hitto insultto criticise as well as to smiletorelaxto contemplate (serenity) than do women The emotional reactions profilefor fear from this study shows that men report a higher probability of reactingwith serenity but not with anger than do women As these behaviourscorrespond to a macho or cool demeanour in a threatening situation they fit thegeneral stereotype of masculine behaviour Conversely women report to bemore likely to trembleto freeze as well as to cryto isolate one self in fearsituations

In sum although many fewer sex differences reached significance whencomparing self-reported expected behaviours for men and women the pattern of

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 631

results is largely congruent with previous findings Specifically women reporteda higher probability of showing behaviours congruent with sadness and fear thandid men whereas men reported higher probabilities for anger and serenebehaviours In addition men reported a higher probability of showing acontempt behaviour in an anger situation yet the relevant behaviour (to staretolook hard) could be interpreted as aggressive in that context

How congruent are the findings fromStudies 1 and 2

As mentioned earlier not all significant differences found in Study 1 for theexpected reactions for men and women in general were also found for self-reports of expected reactions by men and women for themselves Yet as theresults for the two studies are based on different degrees of freedomsignificance levels cannot be directly compared To assess whether stereotypicaland self-reported sex differences were of similar magnitude we computed theeffect sizes for both studies Table 5 shows Cohenrsquos d for the post-hoc

TABLE 5Cohenrsquos d for sex differences in Studies 1 and 2

Study 1 Study 2

SituationEmotionalreactions

Emotionalreactions

Emotionalbehaviours

AngerHappiness 7023Serenity 7025Sadness 203 073 041Fear 123 030Anger 7055 7030Disgust 068Contempt 7026Shame 117 7035Guilt 129

DisgustHappiness 7032 7037 7047Serenity 7045 7026 7021Sadness 095 027Fear 189 033 033AngerDisgust 160 024 024Contempt 050Shame 062 7028 026Guilt 062 020

(Continued)

632 HESS ET AL

TABLE 5(Continued)

Study 1 Study 2

SituationEmotionalreactions

Emotionalreactions

Emotionalbehaviours

SadnessHappiness 7053Serenity 7032Sadness 184 022 024Fear 171 031Anger 7065 042Disgust 7030 7025Contempt 021Shame 020 7046 054Guilt 176 022 7033

FearHappiness 7021 7030Serenity 7026 7041 7052Sadness 189 055Fear 221 082 046Anger 7084 7043Disgust 067ContemptShame 049 7026Guilt 172 7025

ShameHappiness 7045 7023Serenity 7027 7020 7031Sadness 175 041Fear 128Anger 7069Disgust 065Contempt 054Shame 154 035Guilt 153 050

GuiltHappiness 7107 7035Serenity 7051Sadness 198 032 051Fear 162 029AngerDisgust 128Contempt 075Shame 178 051Guilt 183 020

633

comparisons for each emotion in the profile for the six negative emotionsituations across the two studies For Study 1 the effect sizes for the urban andthe rural sample were combined To facilitate the reading of the table onlydifferences for which d was at least 020 (ie equivalent to a small effect) areshown In general effect sizes for Study 1 are larger than those for Study 2 Foremotional reactions the expected differences between men and women were ofmedium (gt 050) to large (gt 080) size whereas for self-perceptions the expecteddifferences between men and women were small to medium in size

The most stable sex difference across the two studies was found for sadnessboth as a core emotion in sadness vignettes and as a secondary emotion That isfor all negative emotions the general stereotype describes women as reactingwith more sadness and women also perceive themselves as reacting with moresadness andor report more sadness behaviours Further women are expected toreact with (and they self-report) more shame and guilt reactionsbehaviours inshame and guilt situations However for the other negative emotions (angerdisgust sadness and fear) men report higher levels of shame reactions or shamebehaviours (but not both) Finally fear reactions and behaviours are described asmore likely for women in general and women perceive themselves as reactingwith more fear in disgust sadness fear and guilt situations

Another very stable sex difference across studies regards happiness andserenity reactions for negative emotion vignettes Men consistently are bothexpected to react with and self-report more happiness reactions as well ashappiness behaviours for disgust fear and shame vignettes To a lesser degreethis pattern also emerges for sadness and guilt vignettes As mentioned in thediscussion of Study 1 this may reflect differences in the value structure betweenmen and women

In sum a comparison of effect sizes shows considerable consistency acrossthe two studies Specifically noteworthy is the very consistent finding for boththe stereotypical beliefs and the self-reports with regard to sadness reactionswhich are considered as more likely for women than for men for all negativeemotion situations studied

However a number of differences between the general stereotypes and theself-perceptions also emerged specifically with regard to shame reactionsWhereas women are generally believed to be more likely to react with shameto negative emotion events the self-reported likelihood for shame as aconcomitant emotion is higher for men for all situations except for guilt(given the general confusion regarding these states observed in Westerncultures this may be due to shame being a core rather than a concomitantemotion for guilt scenarios) Yet self-reported shame behaviours are morelikely for women than for men in sadness and disgust situations A possibleexplanation is that men are actively trying to not show shame reactionsmdashtoconform to the general stereotypemdashbut are aware that they nonetheless arelikely to feel shame in those situations

634 HESS ET AL

To conclude the general stereotype and self-perceptions of emotionalreactions and behaviours suggest that women react with more sadness to all typesof negative emotion events Further the stereotypes and the self-perceptions arein agreement on menrsquos greater likelihood to react with happiness and serenity to avariety of negative emotions In contrast differences between the generalstereotypes and self-perceptions emerge for shame reactions with men reportingin situations when shame is a secondary emotion a higher likelihood of shamereactions but not necessarily shame behaviours than do women

STUDY 3

The results from Study 2 suggest that the stereotypical beliefs regarding menrsquosand womenrsquos emotional reactions and behaviours in a variety of emotion-inducing situations converge with self-perceptions of menrsquos and womenrsquosemotional reactions and behaviours in those same situations This finding isconsistent with the notion that autobiographic statements that requireparticipants to summarise over a number of related experiences may be biasedby stereotypical expectations (see eg Feldman-Barrett et al 1998) This leadsto the question of whether a similar overlap can also be found for narratives ofsingle specific emotional events from the participantsrsquo past If stereotypesindeed influence the way emotional events are reconstructed in a narrative wewould expect to find that women report more sadness events and express moresadness overall as well as more intense target emotions for all but anger eventsConversely we would expect men to report more situations involving anger aswell as experiencing more happiness and serenity overall

However as Study 3 is based on personal narratives and not on standardisedvignettes such a finding could simply be due to the fact that the emotionantecedent events in a real-life setting differ for men and women To assess thispossibility we decided to measure the emotion antecedent events by means of anappraisal questionnaire that assesses the participantsrsquo perception of the emotionantecedent situation To the degree that perceptions of emotion antecedents aresimilar for men and women while reported emotional reactions differ we canconclude that observed sex differences are not due to differences in theperception of the event per se For example if womenrsquos tendency to report moresadness were due to a difference in the perception of the emotion antecedentsituation we would expect women to report more often that they did not feel thatthey could do anything to change the situation or that they had to adapt to thesituation (as sadness is generally associated with the notion of irrevocable loss)

Overview

For this study we translated and adapted a questionnaire reported by Scherer(1988) that consists of two parts The first part invites the participants todescribe an event during which they experienced an emotion The second part

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 635

asks specific questions regarding the appraisal process We added a section inwhich we asked participants to complete an emotion profile for the event Toavoid the possibility that men and women would relate narratives from widelydifferent types of situations we asked participants to describe an event related tofamily interactions This class of situations should be readily accessible to allparticipants and ensure that emotional events involving human interactionpartners were reported

Allowing participants to choose the type of emotional events they report hasseveral advantages Most importantly we can assess what type of emotionalevents men and women choose to report spontaneously It also permitsparticipants to choose a salient event for which they can recollect theinformation necessary to respond to the appraisal questions On the other handthis approach is unlikely to result in a well-balanced distribution of emotiontopics thus making it difficult or impossible to analyse the data separately fordifferent emotion themes Yet in the context of the present study we were onlyinterested in sex differences in reports and not in absolute levels of responsesStudies 1 and 2 suggest that sex differences are very stable across all negativeemotions We therefore decided to allow participants to choose the emotiontheme and analysed the data collapsed across all negative emotion themes

Method

Participants A total of 171 students 87 men and 84 women with a meanage of 1862 years participated in this study Most of the participants (147) wererecruited from an ethnically homogenous junior college in the larger Montrealurban area (Cegep Lionel-Groulx Ste-Therese Quebec Canada) and partici-pated in groups An additional 24 participants were recruited individually

Procedure The experimenter explained that the study concerned emotionalevents in peoplersquos lives Participants were informed of their right to discontinueparticipation at any time and for any reason The experimenter then distributedthe questionnaires and responded to questions regarding the procedure The tasktook between 10 and 30 minutes Most of this time difference can be attributedto the amount of detail provided in the event description that ranged from acouple of words (eg birth of my daughter) to well over a page

Dependent measures The questionnaire consisted of four parts The firstpart was an open-ended question asking the participants to describe any eventinvolving their family life that led them to experience an emotion Sadnessshame anger guilt joy fear and disgust were provided as examples ofemotions Participants were asked to give a detailed description of the situationincluding the events that led up to it their reactions and those of others presentIn addition they were asked to identify the people involved with respect to their

636 HESS ET AL

relationship with them (eg my partner my sister etc) as well as to identify themain emotion theme of the story This served to ensure that the participantsbased their answers to the following questions on a specific event and not on aclass of similar events

Emotion description The second part of the questionnaire consisted ofquestions regarding when the event happened for how long they felt theemotion and the intensity of the core emotion identified as the emotion theme ofthe story Participants were also asked to indicate whether they tried to hide orcontrol their feelings and to what degree This part also contained the emotionprofile used in Studies 1 and 2 Using this measure participants were asked toindicate to what percentage they had felt each of the nine emotions from theprofile

Appraisal questionnaire A series of questions regarding the appraisal processwere used to assess the emotion antecedent events These questions weretranslated from the questionnaire reported by Scherer (1988) Specificallyparticipants were asked to what degree they had expected the situation to occurhow pleasant or unpleasant they considered the event whether the event helpedor hindered them in achieving their aims to what degree they considered that thesituation or the event that caused the emotion was unjust or unfair whether theevent was caused by their own or by someone elsersquos behaviour to what degreethey considered that the behaviour that caused the event would be judged asimproper or immoral by their acquaintances how the event affected theirfeelings about themselves such as their self-esteem or self-confidence andfinally to what degree the event changed their relationships with the peopleinvolved (all on negative-positive 7-point bipolar scales)

In addition participants were given a list of 11 specific potential causes of theevent (caused it myself natural causes act of god etc) They also evaluatedtheir ability to act upon or to cope with the event and its consequences using ascale involving 5 options The last part of the questionnaire consisted ofquestions regarding the participantsrsquo sex their age and whether they werecurrently seeing someone in a love-based relationship and if so for how long

Results

Of the 171 reported emotion events 147 (74 reported by men and 73 reported bywomen) concerned negative emotional events Of these a total of 62 weresadness events 22 were anger events and 11 were guilt events The remainingevents were distributed over a large number of negative emotions

As expected the very low frequency of reports for specific emotion themesmade separate analyses of reports of these events unfeasible We thereforedecided to perform analyses on the data summed over all negative emotionthemes The 24 events with positive emotion themes were obviously excludedfrom these analyses

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 637

Do women report more sadness events and men more anger events Toaddress this question a chi-square test was performed on the frequency withwhich men and women labeled the reported event as a sad versus an anger eventIn line with the results of Studies 1 and 2 we found men to report more angerevents and women to report more sadness events Specifically 14 men and 8women reported anger events and 25 men and 37 women reported sad events w2

= 355 p = 06 d = 42Do women report more intense core emotions than men For the intensity of

the core emotion experienced during the event women reported significantlyhigher levels (M = 593 SD = 101) than men (M = 554 SD = 123) t(145) =222 p = 028 d = 37

Do women and men report different levels of negative emotions across theemotion profile Figure 2 presents the emotion profiles separately for men andwomen An inspection of the profiles shows that overall men report morehappinessserenity whereas women report higher levels of all other emotionsThe profiles are nonparallel F(8 137) = 5877 p lt 001 Post-hoc analysesrevealed a significant sex difference in self-reported sadness with womenreporting higher levels than men To compare the sex differences in the profiles

Figure 2 Emotion profile for menrsquos and womenrsquos self-reported emotional reactions to negativeemotion events (Study 3)

638 HESS ET AL

found in this study with those from Studies 1 and 2 effect sizes were calculatedUsing the same cut-off point as previously (small effect size d = 020) only twodifferences were found to be stable across the three studies Men report higherlevels of happiness for negative emotion events (d = 7022) and women reporthigher levels of sadness (d = 043) As the latter difference may be due to thehigher frequency of reported sadness events by women we also verified whetherwomen report higher levels of sadness when sadness events are excluded fromthe analysis An inspection of the means revealed a marginally significantdifference in the same direction M = 6472 SD = 3247 and M = 5108 SD =3684 for women and men respectively t(83) = 181 p = 074 d = 40

Are there differences in appraisal patterns between men and women Asmentioned earlier the reported differences in emotional reactions could be dueto differences in the perception of the emotion antecedent events Yet nodifferences in appraisal patterns were found suggesting that emotion antecedentevents were perceived similarly In addition despite the more frequent and moreintense reports of sadness women did not report different coping styles thanmen and did not seem to feel more helpless (38 men vs 34 women report thisreaction) In fact women more frequently report that they felt able to lsquolsquoinfluencethe situation positivelyrsquorsquo (19 women vs 9 men report this reaction though thedifference is not significant)

Discussion

Study 3 extended the study of emotion stereotypes and self-perceptions based onvignettes to narratives of emotional events that the participants had in factexperienced themselves The goal of the study was to investigate whether thefindings from Studies 1 and 2 generalise to such recollections of personal eventsThe results strongly suggest this to be the case Women again report higherlevels of sadness for negative emotion events They also report more sad eventsin general Men on the other hand report more anger events as well as morehappiness for negative emotion events as was found in both Studies 1 and 2 Yetno reported differences in appraisal or coping emerged This suggests that theobserved differences in emotional reactions are not due to a bias in the appraisalprocess nor to an inability to act upon the event

If emotion antecedents do not differ why are differences in emotionalreactions reported We suggest that such differences represent an influence ofthe general emotion stereotype on the narrative reconstruction of a personalevent This conclusion is based on the observation of a null effect and thus opento the critique that the present study lacked the power necessary to detect realdifferences in appraisal between men and women To assess this critique wecalculated the absolute mean effect size for the interval-scaled appraisalquestions to be d = 015 To achieve 80 power a sample of 1100 participantswould be needed These data underscore the very slim differences in appraisals

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 639

between men and women making it highly unlikely that the effects observed inthis study are mediated by a difference in appraisal and thus by a difference inthe perception of the underlying event

CONCLUSIONS

The present series of studies had the goal to assess general emotion stereotypesand their influence on self-perceptions of emotional reactions by men andwomen We wanted to both describe these stereotypes in more detail with regardnot only to the modal emotion for a specific event (such as sadness reactions to aloss) but also with regard to the secondary emotions present in these situationsFurther we wanted to assess to what degree such expectations for men andwomen in general are endorsed by individuals for themselves as well as whetherthey would be spontaneously reported when relating a personally experiencedevent

Two gender differences were found to be stable across all three experimentalparadigms Women are expected to be more likely to react with sadness in allnegative emotion situations they expect themselves to be more likely to reactwith sadness as well as to cry and to withdraw more and finally women reportmore sadness in personal events In contrast men are expected to react withmore happinessserenity during negative emotional situations they expectthemselves to react more frequently this way as well as to laugh and smile moreand to be more relaxed They also tend to report more happiness whendescribing negative personal events

Not all general emotion stereotypes were found in the self-perceptionsstudied in Studies 2 and 3 Specifically according to Study 1 women areexpected to be more likely to react with shame and guilt in all negative emotionsituations Yet women did not expect to do so for themselves in situations otherthan shame and guilt situations and in fact men reported to be more likely toreact with shame in a variety of situations Further men and women did notreport any differences with regard to experiences of shame and guilt during thepersonal events

Study 3 included an appraisal questionnaire to address the question whetherthe self-reported differences in emotionality between men and women are due todifferences in the appraisal of the emotion antecedent events or rather to theinfluence of the prevalent norms No differences in appraisals were detectedsuggesting that the self-reported differences may be due to the normative forcesof the general stereotype rather than to appraisal differences

It may be argued that the Study 3 is based on recollections of past events andthat self-reports of emotional experiences represent after the fact reconstructionsthat differ from the actually experienced emotions during the event (seeParkinson amp Manstead 1993) A related argument may be made for Study 2where participants had to estimate the likelihood of their emotional reactions to

640 HESS ET AL

hypothetical events (even though the latter were chosen to be common everydayevents) This may well be true Yet the question remains why did men andwomen reconstruct the events differently in terms of their emotional reactionsThe answer would then be that the prevalent emotion stereotype which islargely endorsed by the population studied influenced this reconstruction Yetas peoplesrsquo sense of self depends on their past histories this would imply thatreconstructions of emotional events in line with emotion stereotypes mayeventually lead individuals to conform more closely to these stereotypes as theybecome more and more part of their emotional history and eventually of theiremotional self

Manuscript received 30 May 1997Revised manuscript received 23 February 2000

REFERENCES

Adams S Kuebli J Boyle PA amp Fivush R (1995) Gender differences in parent-childconversations about past emotions A longitudinal investigation Sex Roles 33 309ndash323

Allen JG amp Haccoun DM (1976) Sex differences in emotionality A multidimensional approachHuman Relations 29 711ndash722

Averill JR (1997) The emotions An integrative approach In R Hogan JA Johnson amp SRBriggs (Eds) Handbook of personality psychology (pp 513ndash541) San Diego CA AcademicPress

Birnbaum DW (1983) Preschoolersrsquo stereotypes about sex differences in emotionality Areaffirmation Journal of Genetic Psychology 143 139ndash140

Briton NJ amp Hall JA (1995) Gender-based expectancies and observer judgements of smilingJournal of Nonverbal Behavior 19 49ndash65

Brody LR amp Hall JA (1993) Gender and emotion In M Lewis amp JM Haviland (Eds)Handbook of emotions (pp 447-460) New York Guilford Press

Crawford J Clippax S Onyx J Gault U amp Benton P (1992) Emotion and genderConstructing meaning from memory London Sage

Dunn J Bretherton I amp Munn P (1987) Conversations about feeling states between mothers andtheir children Developmental Psychology 23 132ndash139

Eagly AH amp Mladinic A (1989) Gender stereotypes and attitudes toward women and menPersonality and Social Psychology Bulletin 15 543ndash558

Ekman P amp Friesen W (1986) A new pan-cultural facial expression of emotion Motivation andEmotion 10 159ndash168

Feldman-Barrett L Robin L Pietromonaco PR amp Eysell KM (1998) Are women the moreemotional sex Evidence from emotional experiences in social context Cognition and Emotion12 555ndash578

Fernandez-Dols J-M amp Ruiz-Belda M-A (1995) Are smiles a sign of happiness Gold medalwinners at the Olympic Games Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 69 1113ndash1119

Fischer A (1993) Sex differences in emotionality Fact or stereotype Feminism and Psychology 3303ndash318

Fivush R (1989) Exploring differences in the emotional content of mother child conversationsabout the past Sex Roles 20 675ndash691

Frank MG amp Ekman P (1993) Not all smiles are created equal The differences betweenenjoyment and nonenjoymen t smiles [Special Issue Current issues in psychological humorresearch] Humor International Journal of Humor Research 6 9ndash26

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 641

Gallois C (1994) Group membership social rules and power A social psychologica l perspectiveon emotional communication Journal of Pragmatics 22 301ndash324

Hall JA (1984) Nonverbal sex differences Communication accuracy and expressive styleBaltimore MD Johns Hopkins University Press

Izard C (1972) Patterns of emotions A new analysis of anxiety and depression New YorkAcademic Press

Jussim L Milbourn M amp Nelson W (1991) Emotional openness Sex-role stereotypes and self-perceptions Representative Research in Social Psychology 19 35ndash52

Kirouac G amp Hess U (1999) Group membership and the decoding of nonverbal behavior In PPhilippot R Feldman amp E Coats (Eds) The social context of nonverbal behavior (pp 182ndash210) New York Cambridge University Press

Kring AM amp Gordon AH (1998) Sex differences in emotion Expression experience andphysiology Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74 686ndash703

LaFrance M amp Banaji M (1992) Toward a reconsideration of the gender-emotion relationship InMS Clark (Ed) Emotion and social behavior Review of personality and social psychology(Vol 14 pp 178ndash201) Newbury Park CA Sage

LaFrance M amp Hecht MA (1995) Why smiles generate leniency Personality and SocialPsychology Bulletin 21 207ndash214

Lazarus RS (1991) Emotion and adaptation Oxford UK Oxford University PressParkinson B amp Manstead ASR (1993) Making sense of emotion in stories and social life

Cognition and Emotion 7 295ndash323Plutchik R (1980) Emotion A psychoevolutionar y synthesis New York Harper amp RowRime B Mesquita B Philippot P amp Boca S (1991) Beyond the emotional event Six studies on

the social sharing of emotion Cognition and Emotion 5 435ndash465Scherer KR (1988) Appendix C Questionnaire used in the International Survey on Emotion

Antecedents and Reactions (ISEAR) In KR Scherer (Ed) Facets of emotion Recent researchHillsdale NJ Erlbaum

Sherman JW amp Bessenhoff GR (1999) Stereotypes as source monitoring cues On theinteraction between episodic and semantic memory Psychological Science 10 106ndash110

Stoppard JM amp Gruchy CD (1993) Gender context and expression of positive emotionPersonality and Social Psychology Bulletin 19 143ndash150

Tucker JS amp Riggio RE (1988) The role of social skills in encoding posed and spontaneousfacial expressions Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 12 87ndash97

Wallbott HG amp Scherer KR (1994) Cultural determinants in experiencing shame and guilt InJune Price Tangney amp Kurt W Fischer (Eds) Self conscious emotions The psychology of shameand guilt embarrasment and pride (pp 465ndash487) New York Guilford Press

642 HESS ET AL

results is largely congruent with previous findings Specifically women reporteda higher probability of showing behaviours congruent with sadness and fear thandid men whereas men reported higher probabilities for anger and serenebehaviours In addition men reported a higher probability of showing acontempt behaviour in an anger situation yet the relevant behaviour (to staretolook hard) could be interpreted as aggressive in that context

How congruent are the findings fromStudies 1 and 2

As mentioned earlier not all significant differences found in Study 1 for theexpected reactions for men and women in general were also found for self-reports of expected reactions by men and women for themselves Yet as theresults for the two studies are based on different degrees of freedomsignificance levels cannot be directly compared To assess whether stereotypicaland self-reported sex differences were of similar magnitude we computed theeffect sizes for both studies Table 5 shows Cohenrsquos d for the post-hoc

TABLE 5Cohenrsquos d for sex differences in Studies 1 and 2

Study 1 Study 2

SituationEmotionalreactions

Emotionalreactions

Emotionalbehaviours

AngerHappiness 7023Serenity 7025Sadness 203 073 041Fear 123 030Anger 7055 7030Disgust 068Contempt 7026Shame 117 7035Guilt 129

DisgustHappiness 7032 7037 7047Serenity 7045 7026 7021Sadness 095 027Fear 189 033 033AngerDisgust 160 024 024Contempt 050Shame 062 7028 026Guilt 062 020

(Continued)

632 HESS ET AL

TABLE 5(Continued)

Study 1 Study 2

SituationEmotionalreactions

Emotionalreactions

Emotionalbehaviours

SadnessHappiness 7053Serenity 7032Sadness 184 022 024Fear 171 031Anger 7065 042Disgust 7030 7025Contempt 021Shame 020 7046 054Guilt 176 022 7033

FearHappiness 7021 7030Serenity 7026 7041 7052Sadness 189 055Fear 221 082 046Anger 7084 7043Disgust 067ContemptShame 049 7026Guilt 172 7025

ShameHappiness 7045 7023Serenity 7027 7020 7031Sadness 175 041Fear 128Anger 7069Disgust 065Contempt 054Shame 154 035Guilt 153 050

GuiltHappiness 7107 7035Serenity 7051Sadness 198 032 051Fear 162 029AngerDisgust 128Contempt 075Shame 178 051Guilt 183 020

633

comparisons for each emotion in the profile for the six negative emotionsituations across the two studies For Study 1 the effect sizes for the urban andthe rural sample were combined To facilitate the reading of the table onlydifferences for which d was at least 020 (ie equivalent to a small effect) areshown In general effect sizes for Study 1 are larger than those for Study 2 Foremotional reactions the expected differences between men and women were ofmedium (gt 050) to large (gt 080) size whereas for self-perceptions the expecteddifferences between men and women were small to medium in size

The most stable sex difference across the two studies was found for sadnessboth as a core emotion in sadness vignettes and as a secondary emotion That isfor all negative emotions the general stereotype describes women as reactingwith more sadness and women also perceive themselves as reacting with moresadness andor report more sadness behaviours Further women are expected toreact with (and they self-report) more shame and guilt reactionsbehaviours inshame and guilt situations However for the other negative emotions (angerdisgust sadness and fear) men report higher levels of shame reactions or shamebehaviours (but not both) Finally fear reactions and behaviours are described asmore likely for women in general and women perceive themselves as reactingwith more fear in disgust sadness fear and guilt situations

Another very stable sex difference across studies regards happiness andserenity reactions for negative emotion vignettes Men consistently are bothexpected to react with and self-report more happiness reactions as well ashappiness behaviours for disgust fear and shame vignettes To a lesser degreethis pattern also emerges for sadness and guilt vignettes As mentioned in thediscussion of Study 1 this may reflect differences in the value structure betweenmen and women

In sum a comparison of effect sizes shows considerable consistency acrossthe two studies Specifically noteworthy is the very consistent finding for boththe stereotypical beliefs and the self-reports with regard to sadness reactionswhich are considered as more likely for women than for men for all negativeemotion situations studied

However a number of differences between the general stereotypes and theself-perceptions also emerged specifically with regard to shame reactionsWhereas women are generally believed to be more likely to react with shameto negative emotion events the self-reported likelihood for shame as aconcomitant emotion is higher for men for all situations except for guilt(given the general confusion regarding these states observed in Westerncultures this may be due to shame being a core rather than a concomitantemotion for guilt scenarios) Yet self-reported shame behaviours are morelikely for women than for men in sadness and disgust situations A possibleexplanation is that men are actively trying to not show shame reactionsmdashtoconform to the general stereotypemdashbut are aware that they nonetheless arelikely to feel shame in those situations

634 HESS ET AL

To conclude the general stereotype and self-perceptions of emotionalreactions and behaviours suggest that women react with more sadness to all typesof negative emotion events Further the stereotypes and the self-perceptions arein agreement on menrsquos greater likelihood to react with happiness and serenity to avariety of negative emotions In contrast differences between the generalstereotypes and self-perceptions emerge for shame reactions with men reportingin situations when shame is a secondary emotion a higher likelihood of shamereactions but not necessarily shame behaviours than do women

STUDY 3

The results from Study 2 suggest that the stereotypical beliefs regarding menrsquosand womenrsquos emotional reactions and behaviours in a variety of emotion-inducing situations converge with self-perceptions of menrsquos and womenrsquosemotional reactions and behaviours in those same situations This finding isconsistent with the notion that autobiographic statements that requireparticipants to summarise over a number of related experiences may be biasedby stereotypical expectations (see eg Feldman-Barrett et al 1998) This leadsto the question of whether a similar overlap can also be found for narratives ofsingle specific emotional events from the participantsrsquo past If stereotypesindeed influence the way emotional events are reconstructed in a narrative wewould expect to find that women report more sadness events and express moresadness overall as well as more intense target emotions for all but anger eventsConversely we would expect men to report more situations involving anger aswell as experiencing more happiness and serenity overall

However as Study 3 is based on personal narratives and not on standardisedvignettes such a finding could simply be due to the fact that the emotionantecedent events in a real-life setting differ for men and women To assess thispossibility we decided to measure the emotion antecedent events by means of anappraisal questionnaire that assesses the participantsrsquo perception of the emotionantecedent situation To the degree that perceptions of emotion antecedents aresimilar for men and women while reported emotional reactions differ we canconclude that observed sex differences are not due to differences in theperception of the event per se For example if womenrsquos tendency to report moresadness were due to a difference in the perception of the emotion antecedentsituation we would expect women to report more often that they did not feel thatthey could do anything to change the situation or that they had to adapt to thesituation (as sadness is generally associated with the notion of irrevocable loss)

Overview

For this study we translated and adapted a questionnaire reported by Scherer(1988) that consists of two parts The first part invites the participants todescribe an event during which they experienced an emotion The second part

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 635

asks specific questions regarding the appraisal process We added a section inwhich we asked participants to complete an emotion profile for the event Toavoid the possibility that men and women would relate narratives from widelydifferent types of situations we asked participants to describe an event related tofamily interactions This class of situations should be readily accessible to allparticipants and ensure that emotional events involving human interactionpartners were reported

Allowing participants to choose the type of emotional events they report hasseveral advantages Most importantly we can assess what type of emotionalevents men and women choose to report spontaneously It also permitsparticipants to choose a salient event for which they can recollect theinformation necessary to respond to the appraisal questions On the other handthis approach is unlikely to result in a well-balanced distribution of emotiontopics thus making it difficult or impossible to analyse the data separately fordifferent emotion themes Yet in the context of the present study we were onlyinterested in sex differences in reports and not in absolute levels of responsesStudies 1 and 2 suggest that sex differences are very stable across all negativeemotions We therefore decided to allow participants to choose the emotiontheme and analysed the data collapsed across all negative emotion themes

Method

Participants A total of 171 students 87 men and 84 women with a meanage of 1862 years participated in this study Most of the participants (147) wererecruited from an ethnically homogenous junior college in the larger Montrealurban area (Cegep Lionel-Groulx Ste-Therese Quebec Canada) and partici-pated in groups An additional 24 participants were recruited individually

Procedure The experimenter explained that the study concerned emotionalevents in peoplersquos lives Participants were informed of their right to discontinueparticipation at any time and for any reason The experimenter then distributedthe questionnaires and responded to questions regarding the procedure The tasktook between 10 and 30 minutes Most of this time difference can be attributedto the amount of detail provided in the event description that ranged from acouple of words (eg birth of my daughter) to well over a page

Dependent measures The questionnaire consisted of four parts The firstpart was an open-ended question asking the participants to describe any eventinvolving their family life that led them to experience an emotion Sadnessshame anger guilt joy fear and disgust were provided as examples ofemotions Participants were asked to give a detailed description of the situationincluding the events that led up to it their reactions and those of others presentIn addition they were asked to identify the people involved with respect to their

636 HESS ET AL

relationship with them (eg my partner my sister etc) as well as to identify themain emotion theme of the story This served to ensure that the participantsbased their answers to the following questions on a specific event and not on aclass of similar events

Emotion description The second part of the questionnaire consisted ofquestions regarding when the event happened for how long they felt theemotion and the intensity of the core emotion identified as the emotion theme ofthe story Participants were also asked to indicate whether they tried to hide orcontrol their feelings and to what degree This part also contained the emotionprofile used in Studies 1 and 2 Using this measure participants were asked toindicate to what percentage they had felt each of the nine emotions from theprofile

Appraisal questionnaire A series of questions regarding the appraisal processwere used to assess the emotion antecedent events These questions weretranslated from the questionnaire reported by Scherer (1988) Specificallyparticipants were asked to what degree they had expected the situation to occurhow pleasant or unpleasant they considered the event whether the event helpedor hindered them in achieving their aims to what degree they considered that thesituation or the event that caused the emotion was unjust or unfair whether theevent was caused by their own or by someone elsersquos behaviour to what degreethey considered that the behaviour that caused the event would be judged asimproper or immoral by their acquaintances how the event affected theirfeelings about themselves such as their self-esteem or self-confidence andfinally to what degree the event changed their relationships with the peopleinvolved (all on negative-positive 7-point bipolar scales)

In addition participants were given a list of 11 specific potential causes of theevent (caused it myself natural causes act of god etc) They also evaluatedtheir ability to act upon or to cope with the event and its consequences using ascale involving 5 options The last part of the questionnaire consisted ofquestions regarding the participantsrsquo sex their age and whether they werecurrently seeing someone in a love-based relationship and if so for how long

Results

Of the 171 reported emotion events 147 (74 reported by men and 73 reported bywomen) concerned negative emotional events Of these a total of 62 weresadness events 22 were anger events and 11 were guilt events The remainingevents were distributed over a large number of negative emotions

As expected the very low frequency of reports for specific emotion themesmade separate analyses of reports of these events unfeasible We thereforedecided to perform analyses on the data summed over all negative emotionthemes The 24 events with positive emotion themes were obviously excludedfrom these analyses

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 637

Do women report more sadness events and men more anger events Toaddress this question a chi-square test was performed on the frequency withwhich men and women labeled the reported event as a sad versus an anger eventIn line with the results of Studies 1 and 2 we found men to report more angerevents and women to report more sadness events Specifically 14 men and 8women reported anger events and 25 men and 37 women reported sad events w2

= 355 p = 06 d = 42Do women report more intense core emotions than men For the intensity of

the core emotion experienced during the event women reported significantlyhigher levels (M = 593 SD = 101) than men (M = 554 SD = 123) t(145) =222 p = 028 d = 37

Do women and men report different levels of negative emotions across theemotion profile Figure 2 presents the emotion profiles separately for men andwomen An inspection of the profiles shows that overall men report morehappinessserenity whereas women report higher levels of all other emotionsThe profiles are nonparallel F(8 137) = 5877 p lt 001 Post-hoc analysesrevealed a significant sex difference in self-reported sadness with womenreporting higher levels than men To compare the sex differences in the profiles

Figure 2 Emotion profile for menrsquos and womenrsquos self-reported emotional reactions to negativeemotion events (Study 3)

638 HESS ET AL

found in this study with those from Studies 1 and 2 effect sizes were calculatedUsing the same cut-off point as previously (small effect size d = 020) only twodifferences were found to be stable across the three studies Men report higherlevels of happiness for negative emotion events (d = 7022) and women reporthigher levels of sadness (d = 043) As the latter difference may be due to thehigher frequency of reported sadness events by women we also verified whetherwomen report higher levels of sadness when sadness events are excluded fromthe analysis An inspection of the means revealed a marginally significantdifference in the same direction M = 6472 SD = 3247 and M = 5108 SD =3684 for women and men respectively t(83) = 181 p = 074 d = 40

Are there differences in appraisal patterns between men and women Asmentioned earlier the reported differences in emotional reactions could be dueto differences in the perception of the emotion antecedent events Yet nodifferences in appraisal patterns were found suggesting that emotion antecedentevents were perceived similarly In addition despite the more frequent and moreintense reports of sadness women did not report different coping styles thanmen and did not seem to feel more helpless (38 men vs 34 women report thisreaction) In fact women more frequently report that they felt able to lsquolsquoinfluencethe situation positivelyrsquorsquo (19 women vs 9 men report this reaction though thedifference is not significant)

Discussion

Study 3 extended the study of emotion stereotypes and self-perceptions based onvignettes to narratives of emotional events that the participants had in factexperienced themselves The goal of the study was to investigate whether thefindings from Studies 1 and 2 generalise to such recollections of personal eventsThe results strongly suggest this to be the case Women again report higherlevels of sadness for negative emotion events They also report more sad eventsin general Men on the other hand report more anger events as well as morehappiness for negative emotion events as was found in both Studies 1 and 2 Yetno reported differences in appraisal or coping emerged This suggests that theobserved differences in emotional reactions are not due to a bias in the appraisalprocess nor to an inability to act upon the event

If emotion antecedents do not differ why are differences in emotionalreactions reported We suggest that such differences represent an influence ofthe general emotion stereotype on the narrative reconstruction of a personalevent This conclusion is based on the observation of a null effect and thus opento the critique that the present study lacked the power necessary to detect realdifferences in appraisal between men and women To assess this critique wecalculated the absolute mean effect size for the interval-scaled appraisalquestions to be d = 015 To achieve 80 power a sample of 1100 participantswould be needed These data underscore the very slim differences in appraisals

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 639

between men and women making it highly unlikely that the effects observed inthis study are mediated by a difference in appraisal and thus by a difference inthe perception of the underlying event

CONCLUSIONS

The present series of studies had the goal to assess general emotion stereotypesand their influence on self-perceptions of emotional reactions by men andwomen We wanted to both describe these stereotypes in more detail with regardnot only to the modal emotion for a specific event (such as sadness reactions to aloss) but also with regard to the secondary emotions present in these situationsFurther we wanted to assess to what degree such expectations for men andwomen in general are endorsed by individuals for themselves as well as whetherthey would be spontaneously reported when relating a personally experiencedevent

Two gender differences were found to be stable across all three experimentalparadigms Women are expected to be more likely to react with sadness in allnegative emotion situations they expect themselves to be more likely to reactwith sadness as well as to cry and to withdraw more and finally women reportmore sadness in personal events In contrast men are expected to react withmore happinessserenity during negative emotional situations they expectthemselves to react more frequently this way as well as to laugh and smile moreand to be more relaxed They also tend to report more happiness whendescribing negative personal events

Not all general emotion stereotypes were found in the self-perceptionsstudied in Studies 2 and 3 Specifically according to Study 1 women areexpected to be more likely to react with shame and guilt in all negative emotionsituations Yet women did not expect to do so for themselves in situations otherthan shame and guilt situations and in fact men reported to be more likely toreact with shame in a variety of situations Further men and women did notreport any differences with regard to experiences of shame and guilt during thepersonal events

Study 3 included an appraisal questionnaire to address the question whetherthe self-reported differences in emotionality between men and women are due todifferences in the appraisal of the emotion antecedent events or rather to theinfluence of the prevalent norms No differences in appraisals were detectedsuggesting that the self-reported differences may be due to the normative forcesof the general stereotype rather than to appraisal differences

It may be argued that the Study 3 is based on recollections of past events andthat self-reports of emotional experiences represent after the fact reconstructionsthat differ from the actually experienced emotions during the event (seeParkinson amp Manstead 1993) A related argument may be made for Study 2where participants had to estimate the likelihood of their emotional reactions to

640 HESS ET AL

hypothetical events (even though the latter were chosen to be common everydayevents) This may well be true Yet the question remains why did men andwomen reconstruct the events differently in terms of their emotional reactionsThe answer would then be that the prevalent emotion stereotype which islargely endorsed by the population studied influenced this reconstruction Yetas peoplesrsquo sense of self depends on their past histories this would imply thatreconstructions of emotional events in line with emotion stereotypes mayeventually lead individuals to conform more closely to these stereotypes as theybecome more and more part of their emotional history and eventually of theiremotional self

Manuscript received 30 May 1997Revised manuscript received 23 February 2000

REFERENCES

Adams S Kuebli J Boyle PA amp Fivush R (1995) Gender differences in parent-childconversations about past emotions A longitudinal investigation Sex Roles 33 309ndash323

Allen JG amp Haccoun DM (1976) Sex differences in emotionality A multidimensional approachHuman Relations 29 711ndash722

Averill JR (1997) The emotions An integrative approach In R Hogan JA Johnson amp SRBriggs (Eds) Handbook of personality psychology (pp 513ndash541) San Diego CA AcademicPress

Birnbaum DW (1983) Preschoolersrsquo stereotypes about sex differences in emotionality Areaffirmation Journal of Genetic Psychology 143 139ndash140

Briton NJ amp Hall JA (1995) Gender-based expectancies and observer judgements of smilingJournal of Nonverbal Behavior 19 49ndash65

Brody LR amp Hall JA (1993) Gender and emotion In M Lewis amp JM Haviland (Eds)Handbook of emotions (pp 447-460) New York Guilford Press

Crawford J Clippax S Onyx J Gault U amp Benton P (1992) Emotion and genderConstructing meaning from memory London Sage

Dunn J Bretherton I amp Munn P (1987) Conversations about feeling states between mothers andtheir children Developmental Psychology 23 132ndash139

Eagly AH amp Mladinic A (1989) Gender stereotypes and attitudes toward women and menPersonality and Social Psychology Bulletin 15 543ndash558

Ekman P amp Friesen W (1986) A new pan-cultural facial expression of emotion Motivation andEmotion 10 159ndash168

Feldman-Barrett L Robin L Pietromonaco PR amp Eysell KM (1998) Are women the moreemotional sex Evidence from emotional experiences in social context Cognition and Emotion12 555ndash578

Fernandez-Dols J-M amp Ruiz-Belda M-A (1995) Are smiles a sign of happiness Gold medalwinners at the Olympic Games Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 69 1113ndash1119

Fischer A (1993) Sex differences in emotionality Fact or stereotype Feminism and Psychology 3303ndash318

Fivush R (1989) Exploring differences in the emotional content of mother child conversationsabout the past Sex Roles 20 675ndash691

Frank MG amp Ekman P (1993) Not all smiles are created equal The differences betweenenjoyment and nonenjoymen t smiles [Special Issue Current issues in psychological humorresearch] Humor International Journal of Humor Research 6 9ndash26

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 641

Gallois C (1994) Group membership social rules and power A social psychologica l perspectiveon emotional communication Journal of Pragmatics 22 301ndash324

Hall JA (1984) Nonverbal sex differences Communication accuracy and expressive styleBaltimore MD Johns Hopkins University Press

Izard C (1972) Patterns of emotions A new analysis of anxiety and depression New YorkAcademic Press

Jussim L Milbourn M amp Nelson W (1991) Emotional openness Sex-role stereotypes and self-perceptions Representative Research in Social Psychology 19 35ndash52

Kirouac G amp Hess U (1999) Group membership and the decoding of nonverbal behavior In PPhilippot R Feldman amp E Coats (Eds) The social context of nonverbal behavior (pp 182ndash210) New York Cambridge University Press

Kring AM amp Gordon AH (1998) Sex differences in emotion Expression experience andphysiology Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74 686ndash703

LaFrance M amp Banaji M (1992) Toward a reconsideration of the gender-emotion relationship InMS Clark (Ed) Emotion and social behavior Review of personality and social psychology(Vol 14 pp 178ndash201) Newbury Park CA Sage

LaFrance M amp Hecht MA (1995) Why smiles generate leniency Personality and SocialPsychology Bulletin 21 207ndash214

Lazarus RS (1991) Emotion and adaptation Oxford UK Oxford University PressParkinson B amp Manstead ASR (1993) Making sense of emotion in stories and social life

Cognition and Emotion 7 295ndash323Plutchik R (1980) Emotion A psychoevolutionar y synthesis New York Harper amp RowRime B Mesquita B Philippot P amp Boca S (1991) Beyond the emotional event Six studies on

the social sharing of emotion Cognition and Emotion 5 435ndash465Scherer KR (1988) Appendix C Questionnaire used in the International Survey on Emotion

Antecedents and Reactions (ISEAR) In KR Scherer (Ed) Facets of emotion Recent researchHillsdale NJ Erlbaum

Sherman JW amp Bessenhoff GR (1999) Stereotypes as source monitoring cues On theinteraction between episodic and semantic memory Psychological Science 10 106ndash110

Stoppard JM amp Gruchy CD (1993) Gender context and expression of positive emotionPersonality and Social Psychology Bulletin 19 143ndash150

Tucker JS amp Riggio RE (1988) The role of social skills in encoding posed and spontaneousfacial expressions Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 12 87ndash97

Wallbott HG amp Scherer KR (1994) Cultural determinants in experiencing shame and guilt InJune Price Tangney amp Kurt W Fischer (Eds) Self conscious emotions The psychology of shameand guilt embarrasment and pride (pp 465ndash487) New York Guilford Press

642 HESS ET AL

TABLE 5(Continued)

Study 1 Study 2

SituationEmotionalreactions

Emotionalreactions

Emotionalbehaviours

SadnessHappiness 7053Serenity 7032Sadness 184 022 024Fear 171 031Anger 7065 042Disgust 7030 7025Contempt 021Shame 020 7046 054Guilt 176 022 7033

FearHappiness 7021 7030Serenity 7026 7041 7052Sadness 189 055Fear 221 082 046Anger 7084 7043Disgust 067ContemptShame 049 7026Guilt 172 7025

ShameHappiness 7045 7023Serenity 7027 7020 7031Sadness 175 041Fear 128Anger 7069Disgust 065Contempt 054Shame 154 035Guilt 153 050

GuiltHappiness 7107 7035Serenity 7051Sadness 198 032 051Fear 162 029AngerDisgust 128Contempt 075Shame 178 051Guilt 183 020

633

comparisons for each emotion in the profile for the six negative emotionsituations across the two studies For Study 1 the effect sizes for the urban andthe rural sample were combined To facilitate the reading of the table onlydifferences for which d was at least 020 (ie equivalent to a small effect) areshown In general effect sizes for Study 1 are larger than those for Study 2 Foremotional reactions the expected differences between men and women were ofmedium (gt 050) to large (gt 080) size whereas for self-perceptions the expecteddifferences between men and women were small to medium in size

The most stable sex difference across the two studies was found for sadnessboth as a core emotion in sadness vignettes and as a secondary emotion That isfor all negative emotions the general stereotype describes women as reactingwith more sadness and women also perceive themselves as reacting with moresadness andor report more sadness behaviours Further women are expected toreact with (and they self-report) more shame and guilt reactionsbehaviours inshame and guilt situations However for the other negative emotions (angerdisgust sadness and fear) men report higher levels of shame reactions or shamebehaviours (but not both) Finally fear reactions and behaviours are described asmore likely for women in general and women perceive themselves as reactingwith more fear in disgust sadness fear and guilt situations

Another very stable sex difference across studies regards happiness andserenity reactions for negative emotion vignettes Men consistently are bothexpected to react with and self-report more happiness reactions as well ashappiness behaviours for disgust fear and shame vignettes To a lesser degreethis pattern also emerges for sadness and guilt vignettes As mentioned in thediscussion of Study 1 this may reflect differences in the value structure betweenmen and women

In sum a comparison of effect sizes shows considerable consistency acrossthe two studies Specifically noteworthy is the very consistent finding for boththe stereotypical beliefs and the self-reports with regard to sadness reactionswhich are considered as more likely for women than for men for all negativeemotion situations studied

However a number of differences between the general stereotypes and theself-perceptions also emerged specifically with regard to shame reactionsWhereas women are generally believed to be more likely to react with shameto negative emotion events the self-reported likelihood for shame as aconcomitant emotion is higher for men for all situations except for guilt(given the general confusion regarding these states observed in Westerncultures this may be due to shame being a core rather than a concomitantemotion for guilt scenarios) Yet self-reported shame behaviours are morelikely for women than for men in sadness and disgust situations A possibleexplanation is that men are actively trying to not show shame reactionsmdashtoconform to the general stereotypemdashbut are aware that they nonetheless arelikely to feel shame in those situations

634 HESS ET AL

To conclude the general stereotype and self-perceptions of emotionalreactions and behaviours suggest that women react with more sadness to all typesof negative emotion events Further the stereotypes and the self-perceptions arein agreement on menrsquos greater likelihood to react with happiness and serenity to avariety of negative emotions In contrast differences between the generalstereotypes and self-perceptions emerge for shame reactions with men reportingin situations when shame is a secondary emotion a higher likelihood of shamereactions but not necessarily shame behaviours than do women

STUDY 3

The results from Study 2 suggest that the stereotypical beliefs regarding menrsquosand womenrsquos emotional reactions and behaviours in a variety of emotion-inducing situations converge with self-perceptions of menrsquos and womenrsquosemotional reactions and behaviours in those same situations This finding isconsistent with the notion that autobiographic statements that requireparticipants to summarise over a number of related experiences may be biasedby stereotypical expectations (see eg Feldman-Barrett et al 1998) This leadsto the question of whether a similar overlap can also be found for narratives ofsingle specific emotional events from the participantsrsquo past If stereotypesindeed influence the way emotional events are reconstructed in a narrative wewould expect to find that women report more sadness events and express moresadness overall as well as more intense target emotions for all but anger eventsConversely we would expect men to report more situations involving anger aswell as experiencing more happiness and serenity overall

However as Study 3 is based on personal narratives and not on standardisedvignettes such a finding could simply be due to the fact that the emotionantecedent events in a real-life setting differ for men and women To assess thispossibility we decided to measure the emotion antecedent events by means of anappraisal questionnaire that assesses the participantsrsquo perception of the emotionantecedent situation To the degree that perceptions of emotion antecedents aresimilar for men and women while reported emotional reactions differ we canconclude that observed sex differences are not due to differences in theperception of the event per se For example if womenrsquos tendency to report moresadness were due to a difference in the perception of the emotion antecedentsituation we would expect women to report more often that they did not feel thatthey could do anything to change the situation or that they had to adapt to thesituation (as sadness is generally associated with the notion of irrevocable loss)

Overview

For this study we translated and adapted a questionnaire reported by Scherer(1988) that consists of two parts The first part invites the participants todescribe an event during which they experienced an emotion The second part

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 635

asks specific questions regarding the appraisal process We added a section inwhich we asked participants to complete an emotion profile for the event Toavoid the possibility that men and women would relate narratives from widelydifferent types of situations we asked participants to describe an event related tofamily interactions This class of situations should be readily accessible to allparticipants and ensure that emotional events involving human interactionpartners were reported

Allowing participants to choose the type of emotional events they report hasseveral advantages Most importantly we can assess what type of emotionalevents men and women choose to report spontaneously It also permitsparticipants to choose a salient event for which they can recollect theinformation necessary to respond to the appraisal questions On the other handthis approach is unlikely to result in a well-balanced distribution of emotiontopics thus making it difficult or impossible to analyse the data separately fordifferent emotion themes Yet in the context of the present study we were onlyinterested in sex differences in reports and not in absolute levels of responsesStudies 1 and 2 suggest that sex differences are very stable across all negativeemotions We therefore decided to allow participants to choose the emotiontheme and analysed the data collapsed across all negative emotion themes

Method

Participants A total of 171 students 87 men and 84 women with a meanage of 1862 years participated in this study Most of the participants (147) wererecruited from an ethnically homogenous junior college in the larger Montrealurban area (Cegep Lionel-Groulx Ste-Therese Quebec Canada) and partici-pated in groups An additional 24 participants were recruited individually

Procedure The experimenter explained that the study concerned emotionalevents in peoplersquos lives Participants were informed of their right to discontinueparticipation at any time and for any reason The experimenter then distributedthe questionnaires and responded to questions regarding the procedure The tasktook between 10 and 30 minutes Most of this time difference can be attributedto the amount of detail provided in the event description that ranged from acouple of words (eg birth of my daughter) to well over a page

Dependent measures The questionnaire consisted of four parts The firstpart was an open-ended question asking the participants to describe any eventinvolving their family life that led them to experience an emotion Sadnessshame anger guilt joy fear and disgust were provided as examples ofemotions Participants were asked to give a detailed description of the situationincluding the events that led up to it their reactions and those of others presentIn addition they were asked to identify the people involved with respect to their

636 HESS ET AL

relationship with them (eg my partner my sister etc) as well as to identify themain emotion theme of the story This served to ensure that the participantsbased their answers to the following questions on a specific event and not on aclass of similar events

Emotion description The second part of the questionnaire consisted ofquestions regarding when the event happened for how long they felt theemotion and the intensity of the core emotion identified as the emotion theme ofthe story Participants were also asked to indicate whether they tried to hide orcontrol their feelings and to what degree This part also contained the emotionprofile used in Studies 1 and 2 Using this measure participants were asked toindicate to what percentage they had felt each of the nine emotions from theprofile

Appraisal questionnaire A series of questions regarding the appraisal processwere used to assess the emotion antecedent events These questions weretranslated from the questionnaire reported by Scherer (1988) Specificallyparticipants were asked to what degree they had expected the situation to occurhow pleasant or unpleasant they considered the event whether the event helpedor hindered them in achieving their aims to what degree they considered that thesituation or the event that caused the emotion was unjust or unfair whether theevent was caused by their own or by someone elsersquos behaviour to what degreethey considered that the behaviour that caused the event would be judged asimproper or immoral by their acquaintances how the event affected theirfeelings about themselves such as their self-esteem or self-confidence andfinally to what degree the event changed their relationships with the peopleinvolved (all on negative-positive 7-point bipolar scales)

In addition participants were given a list of 11 specific potential causes of theevent (caused it myself natural causes act of god etc) They also evaluatedtheir ability to act upon or to cope with the event and its consequences using ascale involving 5 options The last part of the questionnaire consisted ofquestions regarding the participantsrsquo sex their age and whether they werecurrently seeing someone in a love-based relationship and if so for how long

Results

Of the 171 reported emotion events 147 (74 reported by men and 73 reported bywomen) concerned negative emotional events Of these a total of 62 weresadness events 22 were anger events and 11 were guilt events The remainingevents were distributed over a large number of negative emotions

As expected the very low frequency of reports for specific emotion themesmade separate analyses of reports of these events unfeasible We thereforedecided to perform analyses on the data summed over all negative emotionthemes The 24 events with positive emotion themes were obviously excludedfrom these analyses

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 637

Do women report more sadness events and men more anger events Toaddress this question a chi-square test was performed on the frequency withwhich men and women labeled the reported event as a sad versus an anger eventIn line with the results of Studies 1 and 2 we found men to report more angerevents and women to report more sadness events Specifically 14 men and 8women reported anger events and 25 men and 37 women reported sad events w2

= 355 p = 06 d = 42Do women report more intense core emotions than men For the intensity of

the core emotion experienced during the event women reported significantlyhigher levels (M = 593 SD = 101) than men (M = 554 SD = 123) t(145) =222 p = 028 d = 37

Do women and men report different levels of negative emotions across theemotion profile Figure 2 presents the emotion profiles separately for men andwomen An inspection of the profiles shows that overall men report morehappinessserenity whereas women report higher levels of all other emotionsThe profiles are nonparallel F(8 137) = 5877 p lt 001 Post-hoc analysesrevealed a significant sex difference in self-reported sadness with womenreporting higher levels than men To compare the sex differences in the profiles

Figure 2 Emotion profile for menrsquos and womenrsquos self-reported emotional reactions to negativeemotion events (Study 3)

638 HESS ET AL

found in this study with those from Studies 1 and 2 effect sizes were calculatedUsing the same cut-off point as previously (small effect size d = 020) only twodifferences were found to be stable across the three studies Men report higherlevels of happiness for negative emotion events (d = 7022) and women reporthigher levels of sadness (d = 043) As the latter difference may be due to thehigher frequency of reported sadness events by women we also verified whetherwomen report higher levels of sadness when sadness events are excluded fromthe analysis An inspection of the means revealed a marginally significantdifference in the same direction M = 6472 SD = 3247 and M = 5108 SD =3684 for women and men respectively t(83) = 181 p = 074 d = 40

Are there differences in appraisal patterns between men and women Asmentioned earlier the reported differences in emotional reactions could be dueto differences in the perception of the emotion antecedent events Yet nodifferences in appraisal patterns were found suggesting that emotion antecedentevents were perceived similarly In addition despite the more frequent and moreintense reports of sadness women did not report different coping styles thanmen and did not seem to feel more helpless (38 men vs 34 women report thisreaction) In fact women more frequently report that they felt able to lsquolsquoinfluencethe situation positivelyrsquorsquo (19 women vs 9 men report this reaction though thedifference is not significant)

Discussion

Study 3 extended the study of emotion stereotypes and self-perceptions based onvignettes to narratives of emotional events that the participants had in factexperienced themselves The goal of the study was to investigate whether thefindings from Studies 1 and 2 generalise to such recollections of personal eventsThe results strongly suggest this to be the case Women again report higherlevels of sadness for negative emotion events They also report more sad eventsin general Men on the other hand report more anger events as well as morehappiness for negative emotion events as was found in both Studies 1 and 2 Yetno reported differences in appraisal or coping emerged This suggests that theobserved differences in emotional reactions are not due to a bias in the appraisalprocess nor to an inability to act upon the event

If emotion antecedents do not differ why are differences in emotionalreactions reported We suggest that such differences represent an influence ofthe general emotion stereotype on the narrative reconstruction of a personalevent This conclusion is based on the observation of a null effect and thus opento the critique that the present study lacked the power necessary to detect realdifferences in appraisal between men and women To assess this critique wecalculated the absolute mean effect size for the interval-scaled appraisalquestions to be d = 015 To achieve 80 power a sample of 1100 participantswould be needed These data underscore the very slim differences in appraisals

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 639

between men and women making it highly unlikely that the effects observed inthis study are mediated by a difference in appraisal and thus by a difference inthe perception of the underlying event

CONCLUSIONS

The present series of studies had the goal to assess general emotion stereotypesand their influence on self-perceptions of emotional reactions by men andwomen We wanted to both describe these stereotypes in more detail with regardnot only to the modal emotion for a specific event (such as sadness reactions to aloss) but also with regard to the secondary emotions present in these situationsFurther we wanted to assess to what degree such expectations for men andwomen in general are endorsed by individuals for themselves as well as whetherthey would be spontaneously reported when relating a personally experiencedevent

Two gender differences were found to be stable across all three experimentalparadigms Women are expected to be more likely to react with sadness in allnegative emotion situations they expect themselves to be more likely to reactwith sadness as well as to cry and to withdraw more and finally women reportmore sadness in personal events In contrast men are expected to react withmore happinessserenity during negative emotional situations they expectthemselves to react more frequently this way as well as to laugh and smile moreand to be more relaxed They also tend to report more happiness whendescribing negative personal events

Not all general emotion stereotypes were found in the self-perceptionsstudied in Studies 2 and 3 Specifically according to Study 1 women areexpected to be more likely to react with shame and guilt in all negative emotionsituations Yet women did not expect to do so for themselves in situations otherthan shame and guilt situations and in fact men reported to be more likely toreact with shame in a variety of situations Further men and women did notreport any differences with regard to experiences of shame and guilt during thepersonal events

Study 3 included an appraisal questionnaire to address the question whetherthe self-reported differences in emotionality between men and women are due todifferences in the appraisal of the emotion antecedent events or rather to theinfluence of the prevalent norms No differences in appraisals were detectedsuggesting that the self-reported differences may be due to the normative forcesof the general stereotype rather than to appraisal differences

It may be argued that the Study 3 is based on recollections of past events andthat self-reports of emotional experiences represent after the fact reconstructionsthat differ from the actually experienced emotions during the event (seeParkinson amp Manstead 1993) A related argument may be made for Study 2where participants had to estimate the likelihood of their emotional reactions to

640 HESS ET AL

hypothetical events (even though the latter were chosen to be common everydayevents) This may well be true Yet the question remains why did men andwomen reconstruct the events differently in terms of their emotional reactionsThe answer would then be that the prevalent emotion stereotype which islargely endorsed by the population studied influenced this reconstruction Yetas peoplesrsquo sense of self depends on their past histories this would imply thatreconstructions of emotional events in line with emotion stereotypes mayeventually lead individuals to conform more closely to these stereotypes as theybecome more and more part of their emotional history and eventually of theiremotional self

Manuscript received 30 May 1997Revised manuscript received 23 February 2000

REFERENCES

Adams S Kuebli J Boyle PA amp Fivush R (1995) Gender differences in parent-childconversations about past emotions A longitudinal investigation Sex Roles 33 309ndash323

Allen JG amp Haccoun DM (1976) Sex differences in emotionality A multidimensional approachHuman Relations 29 711ndash722

Averill JR (1997) The emotions An integrative approach In R Hogan JA Johnson amp SRBriggs (Eds) Handbook of personality psychology (pp 513ndash541) San Diego CA AcademicPress

Birnbaum DW (1983) Preschoolersrsquo stereotypes about sex differences in emotionality Areaffirmation Journal of Genetic Psychology 143 139ndash140

Briton NJ amp Hall JA (1995) Gender-based expectancies and observer judgements of smilingJournal of Nonverbal Behavior 19 49ndash65

Brody LR amp Hall JA (1993) Gender and emotion In M Lewis amp JM Haviland (Eds)Handbook of emotions (pp 447-460) New York Guilford Press

Crawford J Clippax S Onyx J Gault U amp Benton P (1992) Emotion and genderConstructing meaning from memory London Sage

Dunn J Bretherton I amp Munn P (1987) Conversations about feeling states between mothers andtheir children Developmental Psychology 23 132ndash139

Eagly AH amp Mladinic A (1989) Gender stereotypes and attitudes toward women and menPersonality and Social Psychology Bulletin 15 543ndash558

Ekman P amp Friesen W (1986) A new pan-cultural facial expression of emotion Motivation andEmotion 10 159ndash168

Feldman-Barrett L Robin L Pietromonaco PR amp Eysell KM (1998) Are women the moreemotional sex Evidence from emotional experiences in social context Cognition and Emotion12 555ndash578

Fernandez-Dols J-M amp Ruiz-Belda M-A (1995) Are smiles a sign of happiness Gold medalwinners at the Olympic Games Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 69 1113ndash1119

Fischer A (1993) Sex differences in emotionality Fact or stereotype Feminism and Psychology 3303ndash318

Fivush R (1989) Exploring differences in the emotional content of mother child conversationsabout the past Sex Roles 20 675ndash691

Frank MG amp Ekman P (1993) Not all smiles are created equal The differences betweenenjoyment and nonenjoymen t smiles [Special Issue Current issues in psychological humorresearch] Humor International Journal of Humor Research 6 9ndash26

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 641

Gallois C (1994) Group membership social rules and power A social psychologica l perspectiveon emotional communication Journal of Pragmatics 22 301ndash324

Hall JA (1984) Nonverbal sex differences Communication accuracy and expressive styleBaltimore MD Johns Hopkins University Press

Izard C (1972) Patterns of emotions A new analysis of anxiety and depression New YorkAcademic Press

Jussim L Milbourn M amp Nelson W (1991) Emotional openness Sex-role stereotypes and self-perceptions Representative Research in Social Psychology 19 35ndash52

Kirouac G amp Hess U (1999) Group membership and the decoding of nonverbal behavior In PPhilippot R Feldman amp E Coats (Eds) The social context of nonverbal behavior (pp 182ndash210) New York Cambridge University Press

Kring AM amp Gordon AH (1998) Sex differences in emotion Expression experience andphysiology Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74 686ndash703

LaFrance M amp Banaji M (1992) Toward a reconsideration of the gender-emotion relationship InMS Clark (Ed) Emotion and social behavior Review of personality and social psychology(Vol 14 pp 178ndash201) Newbury Park CA Sage

LaFrance M amp Hecht MA (1995) Why smiles generate leniency Personality and SocialPsychology Bulletin 21 207ndash214

Lazarus RS (1991) Emotion and adaptation Oxford UK Oxford University PressParkinson B amp Manstead ASR (1993) Making sense of emotion in stories and social life

Cognition and Emotion 7 295ndash323Plutchik R (1980) Emotion A psychoevolutionar y synthesis New York Harper amp RowRime B Mesquita B Philippot P amp Boca S (1991) Beyond the emotional event Six studies on

the social sharing of emotion Cognition and Emotion 5 435ndash465Scherer KR (1988) Appendix C Questionnaire used in the International Survey on Emotion

Antecedents and Reactions (ISEAR) In KR Scherer (Ed) Facets of emotion Recent researchHillsdale NJ Erlbaum

Sherman JW amp Bessenhoff GR (1999) Stereotypes as source monitoring cues On theinteraction between episodic and semantic memory Psychological Science 10 106ndash110

Stoppard JM amp Gruchy CD (1993) Gender context and expression of positive emotionPersonality and Social Psychology Bulletin 19 143ndash150

Tucker JS amp Riggio RE (1988) The role of social skills in encoding posed and spontaneousfacial expressions Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 12 87ndash97

Wallbott HG amp Scherer KR (1994) Cultural determinants in experiencing shame and guilt InJune Price Tangney amp Kurt W Fischer (Eds) Self conscious emotions The psychology of shameand guilt embarrasment and pride (pp 465ndash487) New York Guilford Press

642 HESS ET AL

comparisons for each emotion in the profile for the six negative emotionsituations across the two studies For Study 1 the effect sizes for the urban andthe rural sample were combined To facilitate the reading of the table onlydifferences for which d was at least 020 (ie equivalent to a small effect) areshown In general effect sizes for Study 1 are larger than those for Study 2 Foremotional reactions the expected differences between men and women were ofmedium (gt 050) to large (gt 080) size whereas for self-perceptions the expecteddifferences between men and women were small to medium in size

The most stable sex difference across the two studies was found for sadnessboth as a core emotion in sadness vignettes and as a secondary emotion That isfor all negative emotions the general stereotype describes women as reactingwith more sadness and women also perceive themselves as reacting with moresadness andor report more sadness behaviours Further women are expected toreact with (and they self-report) more shame and guilt reactionsbehaviours inshame and guilt situations However for the other negative emotions (angerdisgust sadness and fear) men report higher levels of shame reactions or shamebehaviours (but not both) Finally fear reactions and behaviours are described asmore likely for women in general and women perceive themselves as reactingwith more fear in disgust sadness fear and guilt situations

Another very stable sex difference across studies regards happiness andserenity reactions for negative emotion vignettes Men consistently are bothexpected to react with and self-report more happiness reactions as well ashappiness behaviours for disgust fear and shame vignettes To a lesser degreethis pattern also emerges for sadness and guilt vignettes As mentioned in thediscussion of Study 1 this may reflect differences in the value structure betweenmen and women

In sum a comparison of effect sizes shows considerable consistency acrossthe two studies Specifically noteworthy is the very consistent finding for boththe stereotypical beliefs and the self-reports with regard to sadness reactionswhich are considered as more likely for women than for men for all negativeemotion situations studied

However a number of differences between the general stereotypes and theself-perceptions also emerged specifically with regard to shame reactionsWhereas women are generally believed to be more likely to react with shameto negative emotion events the self-reported likelihood for shame as aconcomitant emotion is higher for men for all situations except for guilt(given the general confusion regarding these states observed in Westerncultures this may be due to shame being a core rather than a concomitantemotion for guilt scenarios) Yet self-reported shame behaviours are morelikely for women than for men in sadness and disgust situations A possibleexplanation is that men are actively trying to not show shame reactionsmdashtoconform to the general stereotypemdashbut are aware that they nonetheless arelikely to feel shame in those situations

634 HESS ET AL

To conclude the general stereotype and self-perceptions of emotionalreactions and behaviours suggest that women react with more sadness to all typesof negative emotion events Further the stereotypes and the self-perceptions arein agreement on menrsquos greater likelihood to react with happiness and serenity to avariety of negative emotions In contrast differences between the generalstereotypes and self-perceptions emerge for shame reactions with men reportingin situations when shame is a secondary emotion a higher likelihood of shamereactions but not necessarily shame behaviours than do women

STUDY 3

The results from Study 2 suggest that the stereotypical beliefs regarding menrsquosand womenrsquos emotional reactions and behaviours in a variety of emotion-inducing situations converge with self-perceptions of menrsquos and womenrsquosemotional reactions and behaviours in those same situations This finding isconsistent with the notion that autobiographic statements that requireparticipants to summarise over a number of related experiences may be biasedby stereotypical expectations (see eg Feldman-Barrett et al 1998) This leadsto the question of whether a similar overlap can also be found for narratives ofsingle specific emotional events from the participantsrsquo past If stereotypesindeed influence the way emotional events are reconstructed in a narrative wewould expect to find that women report more sadness events and express moresadness overall as well as more intense target emotions for all but anger eventsConversely we would expect men to report more situations involving anger aswell as experiencing more happiness and serenity overall

However as Study 3 is based on personal narratives and not on standardisedvignettes such a finding could simply be due to the fact that the emotionantecedent events in a real-life setting differ for men and women To assess thispossibility we decided to measure the emotion antecedent events by means of anappraisal questionnaire that assesses the participantsrsquo perception of the emotionantecedent situation To the degree that perceptions of emotion antecedents aresimilar for men and women while reported emotional reactions differ we canconclude that observed sex differences are not due to differences in theperception of the event per se For example if womenrsquos tendency to report moresadness were due to a difference in the perception of the emotion antecedentsituation we would expect women to report more often that they did not feel thatthey could do anything to change the situation or that they had to adapt to thesituation (as sadness is generally associated with the notion of irrevocable loss)

Overview

For this study we translated and adapted a questionnaire reported by Scherer(1988) that consists of two parts The first part invites the participants todescribe an event during which they experienced an emotion The second part

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 635

asks specific questions regarding the appraisal process We added a section inwhich we asked participants to complete an emotion profile for the event Toavoid the possibility that men and women would relate narratives from widelydifferent types of situations we asked participants to describe an event related tofamily interactions This class of situations should be readily accessible to allparticipants and ensure that emotional events involving human interactionpartners were reported

Allowing participants to choose the type of emotional events they report hasseveral advantages Most importantly we can assess what type of emotionalevents men and women choose to report spontaneously It also permitsparticipants to choose a salient event for which they can recollect theinformation necessary to respond to the appraisal questions On the other handthis approach is unlikely to result in a well-balanced distribution of emotiontopics thus making it difficult or impossible to analyse the data separately fordifferent emotion themes Yet in the context of the present study we were onlyinterested in sex differences in reports and not in absolute levels of responsesStudies 1 and 2 suggest that sex differences are very stable across all negativeemotions We therefore decided to allow participants to choose the emotiontheme and analysed the data collapsed across all negative emotion themes

Method

Participants A total of 171 students 87 men and 84 women with a meanage of 1862 years participated in this study Most of the participants (147) wererecruited from an ethnically homogenous junior college in the larger Montrealurban area (Cegep Lionel-Groulx Ste-Therese Quebec Canada) and partici-pated in groups An additional 24 participants were recruited individually

Procedure The experimenter explained that the study concerned emotionalevents in peoplersquos lives Participants were informed of their right to discontinueparticipation at any time and for any reason The experimenter then distributedthe questionnaires and responded to questions regarding the procedure The tasktook between 10 and 30 minutes Most of this time difference can be attributedto the amount of detail provided in the event description that ranged from acouple of words (eg birth of my daughter) to well over a page

Dependent measures The questionnaire consisted of four parts The firstpart was an open-ended question asking the participants to describe any eventinvolving their family life that led them to experience an emotion Sadnessshame anger guilt joy fear and disgust were provided as examples ofemotions Participants were asked to give a detailed description of the situationincluding the events that led up to it their reactions and those of others presentIn addition they were asked to identify the people involved with respect to their

636 HESS ET AL

relationship with them (eg my partner my sister etc) as well as to identify themain emotion theme of the story This served to ensure that the participantsbased their answers to the following questions on a specific event and not on aclass of similar events

Emotion description The second part of the questionnaire consisted ofquestions regarding when the event happened for how long they felt theemotion and the intensity of the core emotion identified as the emotion theme ofthe story Participants were also asked to indicate whether they tried to hide orcontrol their feelings and to what degree This part also contained the emotionprofile used in Studies 1 and 2 Using this measure participants were asked toindicate to what percentage they had felt each of the nine emotions from theprofile

Appraisal questionnaire A series of questions regarding the appraisal processwere used to assess the emotion antecedent events These questions weretranslated from the questionnaire reported by Scherer (1988) Specificallyparticipants were asked to what degree they had expected the situation to occurhow pleasant or unpleasant they considered the event whether the event helpedor hindered them in achieving their aims to what degree they considered that thesituation or the event that caused the emotion was unjust or unfair whether theevent was caused by their own or by someone elsersquos behaviour to what degreethey considered that the behaviour that caused the event would be judged asimproper or immoral by their acquaintances how the event affected theirfeelings about themselves such as their self-esteem or self-confidence andfinally to what degree the event changed their relationships with the peopleinvolved (all on negative-positive 7-point bipolar scales)

In addition participants were given a list of 11 specific potential causes of theevent (caused it myself natural causes act of god etc) They also evaluatedtheir ability to act upon or to cope with the event and its consequences using ascale involving 5 options The last part of the questionnaire consisted ofquestions regarding the participantsrsquo sex their age and whether they werecurrently seeing someone in a love-based relationship and if so for how long

Results

Of the 171 reported emotion events 147 (74 reported by men and 73 reported bywomen) concerned negative emotional events Of these a total of 62 weresadness events 22 were anger events and 11 were guilt events The remainingevents were distributed over a large number of negative emotions

As expected the very low frequency of reports for specific emotion themesmade separate analyses of reports of these events unfeasible We thereforedecided to perform analyses on the data summed over all negative emotionthemes The 24 events with positive emotion themes were obviously excludedfrom these analyses

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 637

Do women report more sadness events and men more anger events Toaddress this question a chi-square test was performed on the frequency withwhich men and women labeled the reported event as a sad versus an anger eventIn line with the results of Studies 1 and 2 we found men to report more angerevents and women to report more sadness events Specifically 14 men and 8women reported anger events and 25 men and 37 women reported sad events w2

= 355 p = 06 d = 42Do women report more intense core emotions than men For the intensity of

the core emotion experienced during the event women reported significantlyhigher levels (M = 593 SD = 101) than men (M = 554 SD = 123) t(145) =222 p = 028 d = 37

Do women and men report different levels of negative emotions across theemotion profile Figure 2 presents the emotion profiles separately for men andwomen An inspection of the profiles shows that overall men report morehappinessserenity whereas women report higher levels of all other emotionsThe profiles are nonparallel F(8 137) = 5877 p lt 001 Post-hoc analysesrevealed a significant sex difference in self-reported sadness with womenreporting higher levels than men To compare the sex differences in the profiles

Figure 2 Emotion profile for menrsquos and womenrsquos self-reported emotional reactions to negativeemotion events (Study 3)

638 HESS ET AL

found in this study with those from Studies 1 and 2 effect sizes were calculatedUsing the same cut-off point as previously (small effect size d = 020) only twodifferences were found to be stable across the three studies Men report higherlevels of happiness for negative emotion events (d = 7022) and women reporthigher levels of sadness (d = 043) As the latter difference may be due to thehigher frequency of reported sadness events by women we also verified whetherwomen report higher levels of sadness when sadness events are excluded fromthe analysis An inspection of the means revealed a marginally significantdifference in the same direction M = 6472 SD = 3247 and M = 5108 SD =3684 for women and men respectively t(83) = 181 p = 074 d = 40

Are there differences in appraisal patterns between men and women Asmentioned earlier the reported differences in emotional reactions could be dueto differences in the perception of the emotion antecedent events Yet nodifferences in appraisal patterns were found suggesting that emotion antecedentevents were perceived similarly In addition despite the more frequent and moreintense reports of sadness women did not report different coping styles thanmen and did not seem to feel more helpless (38 men vs 34 women report thisreaction) In fact women more frequently report that they felt able to lsquolsquoinfluencethe situation positivelyrsquorsquo (19 women vs 9 men report this reaction though thedifference is not significant)

Discussion

Study 3 extended the study of emotion stereotypes and self-perceptions based onvignettes to narratives of emotional events that the participants had in factexperienced themselves The goal of the study was to investigate whether thefindings from Studies 1 and 2 generalise to such recollections of personal eventsThe results strongly suggest this to be the case Women again report higherlevels of sadness for negative emotion events They also report more sad eventsin general Men on the other hand report more anger events as well as morehappiness for negative emotion events as was found in both Studies 1 and 2 Yetno reported differences in appraisal or coping emerged This suggests that theobserved differences in emotional reactions are not due to a bias in the appraisalprocess nor to an inability to act upon the event

If emotion antecedents do not differ why are differences in emotionalreactions reported We suggest that such differences represent an influence ofthe general emotion stereotype on the narrative reconstruction of a personalevent This conclusion is based on the observation of a null effect and thus opento the critique that the present study lacked the power necessary to detect realdifferences in appraisal between men and women To assess this critique wecalculated the absolute mean effect size for the interval-scaled appraisalquestions to be d = 015 To achieve 80 power a sample of 1100 participantswould be needed These data underscore the very slim differences in appraisals

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 639

between men and women making it highly unlikely that the effects observed inthis study are mediated by a difference in appraisal and thus by a difference inthe perception of the underlying event

CONCLUSIONS

The present series of studies had the goal to assess general emotion stereotypesand their influence on self-perceptions of emotional reactions by men andwomen We wanted to both describe these stereotypes in more detail with regardnot only to the modal emotion for a specific event (such as sadness reactions to aloss) but also with regard to the secondary emotions present in these situationsFurther we wanted to assess to what degree such expectations for men andwomen in general are endorsed by individuals for themselves as well as whetherthey would be spontaneously reported when relating a personally experiencedevent

Two gender differences were found to be stable across all three experimentalparadigms Women are expected to be more likely to react with sadness in allnegative emotion situations they expect themselves to be more likely to reactwith sadness as well as to cry and to withdraw more and finally women reportmore sadness in personal events In contrast men are expected to react withmore happinessserenity during negative emotional situations they expectthemselves to react more frequently this way as well as to laugh and smile moreand to be more relaxed They also tend to report more happiness whendescribing negative personal events

Not all general emotion stereotypes were found in the self-perceptionsstudied in Studies 2 and 3 Specifically according to Study 1 women areexpected to be more likely to react with shame and guilt in all negative emotionsituations Yet women did not expect to do so for themselves in situations otherthan shame and guilt situations and in fact men reported to be more likely toreact with shame in a variety of situations Further men and women did notreport any differences with regard to experiences of shame and guilt during thepersonal events

Study 3 included an appraisal questionnaire to address the question whetherthe self-reported differences in emotionality between men and women are due todifferences in the appraisal of the emotion antecedent events or rather to theinfluence of the prevalent norms No differences in appraisals were detectedsuggesting that the self-reported differences may be due to the normative forcesof the general stereotype rather than to appraisal differences

It may be argued that the Study 3 is based on recollections of past events andthat self-reports of emotional experiences represent after the fact reconstructionsthat differ from the actually experienced emotions during the event (seeParkinson amp Manstead 1993) A related argument may be made for Study 2where participants had to estimate the likelihood of their emotional reactions to

640 HESS ET AL

hypothetical events (even though the latter were chosen to be common everydayevents) This may well be true Yet the question remains why did men andwomen reconstruct the events differently in terms of their emotional reactionsThe answer would then be that the prevalent emotion stereotype which islargely endorsed by the population studied influenced this reconstruction Yetas peoplesrsquo sense of self depends on their past histories this would imply thatreconstructions of emotional events in line with emotion stereotypes mayeventually lead individuals to conform more closely to these stereotypes as theybecome more and more part of their emotional history and eventually of theiremotional self

Manuscript received 30 May 1997Revised manuscript received 23 February 2000

REFERENCES

Adams S Kuebli J Boyle PA amp Fivush R (1995) Gender differences in parent-childconversations about past emotions A longitudinal investigation Sex Roles 33 309ndash323

Allen JG amp Haccoun DM (1976) Sex differences in emotionality A multidimensional approachHuman Relations 29 711ndash722

Averill JR (1997) The emotions An integrative approach In R Hogan JA Johnson amp SRBriggs (Eds) Handbook of personality psychology (pp 513ndash541) San Diego CA AcademicPress

Birnbaum DW (1983) Preschoolersrsquo stereotypes about sex differences in emotionality Areaffirmation Journal of Genetic Psychology 143 139ndash140

Briton NJ amp Hall JA (1995) Gender-based expectancies and observer judgements of smilingJournal of Nonverbal Behavior 19 49ndash65

Brody LR amp Hall JA (1993) Gender and emotion In M Lewis amp JM Haviland (Eds)Handbook of emotions (pp 447-460) New York Guilford Press

Crawford J Clippax S Onyx J Gault U amp Benton P (1992) Emotion and genderConstructing meaning from memory London Sage

Dunn J Bretherton I amp Munn P (1987) Conversations about feeling states between mothers andtheir children Developmental Psychology 23 132ndash139

Eagly AH amp Mladinic A (1989) Gender stereotypes and attitudes toward women and menPersonality and Social Psychology Bulletin 15 543ndash558

Ekman P amp Friesen W (1986) A new pan-cultural facial expression of emotion Motivation andEmotion 10 159ndash168

Feldman-Barrett L Robin L Pietromonaco PR amp Eysell KM (1998) Are women the moreemotional sex Evidence from emotional experiences in social context Cognition and Emotion12 555ndash578

Fernandez-Dols J-M amp Ruiz-Belda M-A (1995) Are smiles a sign of happiness Gold medalwinners at the Olympic Games Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 69 1113ndash1119

Fischer A (1993) Sex differences in emotionality Fact or stereotype Feminism and Psychology 3303ndash318

Fivush R (1989) Exploring differences in the emotional content of mother child conversationsabout the past Sex Roles 20 675ndash691

Frank MG amp Ekman P (1993) Not all smiles are created equal The differences betweenenjoyment and nonenjoymen t smiles [Special Issue Current issues in psychological humorresearch] Humor International Journal of Humor Research 6 9ndash26

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 641

Gallois C (1994) Group membership social rules and power A social psychologica l perspectiveon emotional communication Journal of Pragmatics 22 301ndash324

Hall JA (1984) Nonverbal sex differences Communication accuracy and expressive styleBaltimore MD Johns Hopkins University Press

Izard C (1972) Patterns of emotions A new analysis of anxiety and depression New YorkAcademic Press

Jussim L Milbourn M amp Nelson W (1991) Emotional openness Sex-role stereotypes and self-perceptions Representative Research in Social Psychology 19 35ndash52

Kirouac G amp Hess U (1999) Group membership and the decoding of nonverbal behavior In PPhilippot R Feldman amp E Coats (Eds) The social context of nonverbal behavior (pp 182ndash210) New York Cambridge University Press

Kring AM amp Gordon AH (1998) Sex differences in emotion Expression experience andphysiology Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74 686ndash703

LaFrance M amp Banaji M (1992) Toward a reconsideration of the gender-emotion relationship InMS Clark (Ed) Emotion and social behavior Review of personality and social psychology(Vol 14 pp 178ndash201) Newbury Park CA Sage

LaFrance M amp Hecht MA (1995) Why smiles generate leniency Personality and SocialPsychology Bulletin 21 207ndash214

Lazarus RS (1991) Emotion and adaptation Oxford UK Oxford University PressParkinson B amp Manstead ASR (1993) Making sense of emotion in stories and social life

Cognition and Emotion 7 295ndash323Plutchik R (1980) Emotion A psychoevolutionar y synthesis New York Harper amp RowRime B Mesquita B Philippot P amp Boca S (1991) Beyond the emotional event Six studies on

the social sharing of emotion Cognition and Emotion 5 435ndash465Scherer KR (1988) Appendix C Questionnaire used in the International Survey on Emotion

Antecedents and Reactions (ISEAR) In KR Scherer (Ed) Facets of emotion Recent researchHillsdale NJ Erlbaum

Sherman JW amp Bessenhoff GR (1999) Stereotypes as source monitoring cues On theinteraction between episodic and semantic memory Psychological Science 10 106ndash110

Stoppard JM amp Gruchy CD (1993) Gender context and expression of positive emotionPersonality and Social Psychology Bulletin 19 143ndash150

Tucker JS amp Riggio RE (1988) The role of social skills in encoding posed and spontaneousfacial expressions Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 12 87ndash97

Wallbott HG amp Scherer KR (1994) Cultural determinants in experiencing shame and guilt InJune Price Tangney amp Kurt W Fischer (Eds) Self conscious emotions The psychology of shameand guilt embarrasment and pride (pp 465ndash487) New York Guilford Press

642 HESS ET AL

To conclude the general stereotype and self-perceptions of emotionalreactions and behaviours suggest that women react with more sadness to all typesof negative emotion events Further the stereotypes and the self-perceptions arein agreement on menrsquos greater likelihood to react with happiness and serenity to avariety of negative emotions In contrast differences between the generalstereotypes and self-perceptions emerge for shame reactions with men reportingin situations when shame is a secondary emotion a higher likelihood of shamereactions but not necessarily shame behaviours than do women

STUDY 3

The results from Study 2 suggest that the stereotypical beliefs regarding menrsquosand womenrsquos emotional reactions and behaviours in a variety of emotion-inducing situations converge with self-perceptions of menrsquos and womenrsquosemotional reactions and behaviours in those same situations This finding isconsistent with the notion that autobiographic statements that requireparticipants to summarise over a number of related experiences may be biasedby stereotypical expectations (see eg Feldman-Barrett et al 1998) This leadsto the question of whether a similar overlap can also be found for narratives ofsingle specific emotional events from the participantsrsquo past If stereotypesindeed influence the way emotional events are reconstructed in a narrative wewould expect to find that women report more sadness events and express moresadness overall as well as more intense target emotions for all but anger eventsConversely we would expect men to report more situations involving anger aswell as experiencing more happiness and serenity overall

However as Study 3 is based on personal narratives and not on standardisedvignettes such a finding could simply be due to the fact that the emotionantecedent events in a real-life setting differ for men and women To assess thispossibility we decided to measure the emotion antecedent events by means of anappraisal questionnaire that assesses the participantsrsquo perception of the emotionantecedent situation To the degree that perceptions of emotion antecedents aresimilar for men and women while reported emotional reactions differ we canconclude that observed sex differences are not due to differences in theperception of the event per se For example if womenrsquos tendency to report moresadness were due to a difference in the perception of the emotion antecedentsituation we would expect women to report more often that they did not feel thatthey could do anything to change the situation or that they had to adapt to thesituation (as sadness is generally associated with the notion of irrevocable loss)

Overview

For this study we translated and adapted a questionnaire reported by Scherer(1988) that consists of two parts The first part invites the participants todescribe an event during which they experienced an emotion The second part

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 635

asks specific questions regarding the appraisal process We added a section inwhich we asked participants to complete an emotion profile for the event Toavoid the possibility that men and women would relate narratives from widelydifferent types of situations we asked participants to describe an event related tofamily interactions This class of situations should be readily accessible to allparticipants and ensure that emotional events involving human interactionpartners were reported

Allowing participants to choose the type of emotional events they report hasseveral advantages Most importantly we can assess what type of emotionalevents men and women choose to report spontaneously It also permitsparticipants to choose a salient event for which they can recollect theinformation necessary to respond to the appraisal questions On the other handthis approach is unlikely to result in a well-balanced distribution of emotiontopics thus making it difficult or impossible to analyse the data separately fordifferent emotion themes Yet in the context of the present study we were onlyinterested in sex differences in reports and not in absolute levels of responsesStudies 1 and 2 suggest that sex differences are very stable across all negativeemotions We therefore decided to allow participants to choose the emotiontheme and analysed the data collapsed across all negative emotion themes

Method

Participants A total of 171 students 87 men and 84 women with a meanage of 1862 years participated in this study Most of the participants (147) wererecruited from an ethnically homogenous junior college in the larger Montrealurban area (Cegep Lionel-Groulx Ste-Therese Quebec Canada) and partici-pated in groups An additional 24 participants were recruited individually

Procedure The experimenter explained that the study concerned emotionalevents in peoplersquos lives Participants were informed of their right to discontinueparticipation at any time and for any reason The experimenter then distributedthe questionnaires and responded to questions regarding the procedure The tasktook between 10 and 30 minutes Most of this time difference can be attributedto the amount of detail provided in the event description that ranged from acouple of words (eg birth of my daughter) to well over a page

Dependent measures The questionnaire consisted of four parts The firstpart was an open-ended question asking the participants to describe any eventinvolving their family life that led them to experience an emotion Sadnessshame anger guilt joy fear and disgust were provided as examples ofemotions Participants were asked to give a detailed description of the situationincluding the events that led up to it their reactions and those of others presentIn addition they were asked to identify the people involved with respect to their

636 HESS ET AL

relationship with them (eg my partner my sister etc) as well as to identify themain emotion theme of the story This served to ensure that the participantsbased their answers to the following questions on a specific event and not on aclass of similar events

Emotion description The second part of the questionnaire consisted ofquestions regarding when the event happened for how long they felt theemotion and the intensity of the core emotion identified as the emotion theme ofthe story Participants were also asked to indicate whether they tried to hide orcontrol their feelings and to what degree This part also contained the emotionprofile used in Studies 1 and 2 Using this measure participants were asked toindicate to what percentage they had felt each of the nine emotions from theprofile

Appraisal questionnaire A series of questions regarding the appraisal processwere used to assess the emotion antecedent events These questions weretranslated from the questionnaire reported by Scherer (1988) Specificallyparticipants were asked to what degree they had expected the situation to occurhow pleasant or unpleasant they considered the event whether the event helpedor hindered them in achieving their aims to what degree they considered that thesituation or the event that caused the emotion was unjust or unfair whether theevent was caused by their own or by someone elsersquos behaviour to what degreethey considered that the behaviour that caused the event would be judged asimproper or immoral by their acquaintances how the event affected theirfeelings about themselves such as their self-esteem or self-confidence andfinally to what degree the event changed their relationships with the peopleinvolved (all on negative-positive 7-point bipolar scales)

In addition participants were given a list of 11 specific potential causes of theevent (caused it myself natural causes act of god etc) They also evaluatedtheir ability to act upon or to cope with the event and its consequences using ascale involving 5 options The last part of the questionnaire consisted ofquestions regarding the participantsrsquo sex their age and whether they werecurrently seeing someone in a love-based relationship and if so for how long

Results

Of the 171 reported emotion events 147 (74 reported by men and 73 reported bywomen) concerned negative emotional events Of these a total of 62 weresadness events 22 were anger events and 11 were guilt events The remainingevents were distributed over a large number of negative emotions

As expected the very low frequency of reports for specific emotion themesmade separate analyses of reports of these events unfeasible We thereforedecided to perform analyses on the data summed over all negative emotionthemes The 24 events with positive emotion themes were obviously excludedfrom these analyses

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 637

Do women report more sadness events and men more anger events Toaddress this question a chi-square test was performed on the frequency withwhich men and women labeled the reported event as a sad versus an anger eventIn line with the results of Studies 1 and 2 we found men to report more angerevents and women to report more sadness events Specifically 14 men and 8women reported anger events and 25 men and 37 women reported sad events w2

= 355 p = 06 d = 42Do women report more intense core emotions than men For the intensity of

the core emotion experienced during the event women reported significantlyhigher levels (M = 593 SD = 101) than men (M = 554 SD = 123) t(145) =222 p = 028 d = 37

Do women and men report different levels of negative emotions across theemotion profile Figure 2 presents the emotion profiles separately for men andwomen An inspection of the profiles shows that overall men report morehappinessserenity whereas women report higher levels of all other emotionsThe profiles are nonparallel F(8 137) = 5877 p lt 001 Post-hoc analysesrevealed a significant sex difference in self-reported sadness with womenreporting higher levels than men To compare the sex differences in the profiles

Figure 2 Emotion profile for menrsquos and womenrsquos self-reported emotional reactions to negativeemotion events (Study 3)

638 HESS ET AL

found in this study with those from Studies 1 and 2 effect sizes were calculatedUsing the same cut-off point as previously (small effect size d = 020) only twodifferences were found to be stable across the three studies Men report higherlevels of happiness for negative emotion events (d = 7022) and women reporthigher levels of sadness (d = 043) As the latter difference may be due to thehigher frequency of reported sadness events by women we also verified whetherwomen report higher levels of sadness when sadness events are excluded fromthe analysis An inspection of the means revealed a marginally significantdifference in the same direction M = 6472 SD = 3247 and M = 5108 SD =3684 for women and men respectively t(83) = 181 p = 074 d = 40

Are there differences in appraisal patterns between men and women Asmentioned earlier the reported differences in emotional reactions could be dueto differences in the perception of the emotion antecedent events Yet nodifferences in appraisal patterns were found suggesting that emotion antecedentevents were perceived similarly In addition despite the more frequent and moreintense reports of sadness women did not report different coping styles thanmen and did not seem to feel more helpless (38 men vs 34 women report thisreaction) In fact women more frequently report that they felt able to lsquolsquoinfluencethe situation positivelyrsquorsquo (19 women vs 9 men report this reaction though thedifference is not significant)

Discussion

Study 3 extended the study of emotion stereotypes and self-perceptions based onvignettes to narratives of emotional events that the participants had in factexperienced themselves The goal of the study was to investigate whether thefindings from Studies 1 and 2 generalise to such recollections of personal eventsThe results strongly suggest this to be the case Women again report higherlevels of sadness for negative emotion events They also report more sad eventsin general Men on the other hand report more anger events as well as morehappiness for negative emotion events as was found in both Studies 1 and 2 Yetno reported differences in appraisal or coping emerged This suggests that theobserved differences in emotional reactions are not due to a bias in the appraisalprocess nor to an inability to act upon the event

If emotion antecedents do not differ why are differences in emotionalreactions reported We suggest that such differences represent an influence ofthe general emotion stereotype on the narrative reconstruction of a personalevent This conclusion is based on the observation of a null effect and thus opento the critique that the present study lacked the power necessary to detect realdifferences in appraisal between men and women To assess this critique wecalculated the absolute mean effect size for the interval-scaled appraisalquestions to be d = 015 To achieve 80 power a sample of 1100 participantswould be needed These data underscore the very slim differences in appraisals

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 639

between men and women making it highly unlikely that the effects observed inthis study are mediated by a difference in appraisal and thus by a difference inthe perception of the underlying event

CONCLUSIONS

The present series of studies had the goal to assess general emotion stereotypesand their influence on self-perceptions of emotional reactions by men andwomen We wanted to both describe these stereotypes in more detail with regardnot only to the modal emotion for a specific event (such as sadness reactions to aloss) but also with regard to the secondary emotions present in these situationsFurther we wanted to assess to what degree such expectations for men andwomen in general are endorsed by individuals for themselves as well as whetherthey would be spontaneously reported when relating a personally experiencedevent

Two gender differences were found to be stable across all three experimentalparadigms Women are expected to be more likely to react with sadness in allnegative emotion situations they expect themselves to be more likely to reactwith sadness as well as to cry and to withdraw more and finally women reportmore sadness in personal events In contrast men are expected to react withmore happinessserenity during negative emotional situations they expectthemselves to react more frequently this way as well as to laugh and smile moreand to be more relaxed They also tend to report more happiness whendescribing negative personal events

Not all general emotion stereotypes were found in the self-perceptionsstudied in Studies 2 and 3 Specifically according to Study 1 women areexpected to be more likely to react with shame and guilt in all negative emotionsituations Yet women did not expect to do so for themselves in situations otherthan shame and guilt situations and in fact men reported to be more likely toreact with shame in a variety of situations Further men and women did notreport any differences with regard to experiences of shame and guilt during thepersonal events

Study 3 included an appraisal questionnaire to address the question whetherthe self-reported differences in emotionality between men and women are due todifferences in the appraisal of the emotion antecedent events or rather to theinfluence of the prevalent norms No differences in appraisals were detectedsuggesting that the self-reported differences may be due to the normative forcesof the general stereotype rather than to appraisal differences

It may be argued that the Study 3 is based on recollections of past events andthat self-reports of emotional experiences represent after the fact reconstructionsthat differ from the actually experienced emotions during the event (seeParkinson amp Manstead 1993) A related argument may be made for Study 2where participants had to estimate the likelihood of their emotional reactions to

640 HESS ET AL

hypothetical events (even though the latter were chosen to be common everydayevents) This may well be true Yet the question remains why did men andwomen reconstruct the events differently in terms of their emotional reactionsThe answer would then be that the prevalent emotion stereotype which islargely endorsed by the population studied influenced this reconstruction Yetas peoplesrsquo sense of self depends on their past histories this would imply thatreconstructions of emotional events in line with emotion stereotypes mayeventually lead individuals to conform more closely to these stereotypes as theybecome more and more part of their emotional history and eventually of theiremotional self

Manuscript received 30 May 1997Revised manuscript received 23 February 2000

REFERENCES

Adams S Kuebli J Boyle PA amp Fivush R (1995) Gender differences in parent-childconversations about past emotions A longitudinal investigation Sex Roles 33 309ndash323

Allen JG amp Haccoun DM (1976) Sex differences in emotionality A multidimensional approachHuman Relations 29 711ndash722

Averill JR (1997) The emotions An integrative approach In R Hogan JA Johnson amp SRBriggs (Eds) Handbook of personality psychology (pp 513ndash541) San Diego CA AcademicPress

Birnbaum DW (1983) Preschoolersrsquo stereotypes about sex differences in emotionality Areaffirmation Journal of Genetic Psychology 143 139ndash140

Briton NJ amp Hall JA (1995) Gender-based expectancies and observer judgements of smilingJournal of Nonverbal Behavior 19 49ndash65

Brody LR amp Hall JA (1993) Gender and emotion In M Lewis amp JM Haviland (Eds)Handbook of emotions (pp 447-460) New York Guilford Press

Crawford J Clippax S Onyx J Gault U amp Benton P (1992) Emotion and genderConstructing meaning from memory London Sage

Dunn J Bretherton I amp Munn P (1987) Conversations about feeling states between mothers andtheir children Developmental Psychology 23 132ndash139

Eagly AH amp Mladinic A (1989) Gender stereotypes and attitudes toward women and menPersonality and Social Psychology Bulletin 15 543ndash558

Ekman P amp Friesen W (1986) A new pan-cultural facial expression of emotion Motivation andEmotion 10 159ndash168

Feldman-Barrett L Robin L Pietromonaco PR amp Eysell KM (1998) Are women the moreemotional sex Evidence from emotional experiences in social context Cognition and Emotion12 555ndash578

Fernandez-Dols J-M amp Ruiz-Belda M-A (1995) Are smiles a sign of happiness Gold medalwinners at the Olympic Games Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 69 1113ndash1119

Fischer A (1993) Sex differences in emotionality Fact or stereotype Feminism and Psychology 3303ndash318

Fivush R (1989) Exploring differences in the emotional content of mother child conversationsabout the past Sex Roles 20 675ndash691

Frank MG amp Ekman P (1993) Not all smiles are created equal The differences betweenenjoyment and nonenjoymen t smiles [Special Issue Current issues in psychological humorresearch] Humor International Journal of Humor Research 6 9ndash26

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 641

Gallois C (1994) Group membership social rules and power A social psychologica l perspectiveon emotional communication Journal of Pragmatics 22 301ndash324

Hall JA (1984) Nonverbal sex differences Communication accuracy and expressive styleBaltimore MD Johns Hopkins University Press

Izard C (1972) Patterns of emotions A new analysis of anxiety and depression New YorkAcademic Press

Jussim L Milbourn M amp Nelson W (1991) Emotional openness Sex-role stereotypes and self-perceptions Representative Research in Social Psychology 19 35ndash52

Kirouac G amp Hess U (1999) Group membership and the decoding of nonverbal behavior In PPhilippot R Feldman amp E Coats (Eds) The social context of nonverbal behavior (pp 182ndash210) New York Cambridge University Press

Kring AM amp Gordon AH (1998) Sex differences in emotion Expression experience andphysiology Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74 686ndash703

LaFrance M amp Banaji M (1992) Toward a reconsideration of the gender-emotion relationship InMS Clark (Ed) Emotion and social behavior Review of personality and social psychology(Vol 14 pp 178ndash201) Newbury Park CA Sage

LaFrance M amp Hecht MA (1995) Why smiles generate leniency Personality and SocialPsychology Bulletin 21 207ndash214

Lazarus RS (1991) Emotion and adaptation Oxford UK Oxford University PressParkinson B amp Manstead ASR (1993) Making sense of emotion in stories and social life

Cognition and Emotion 7 295ndash323Plutchik R (1980) Emotion A psychoevolutionar y synthesis New York Harper amp RowRime B Mesquita B Philippot P amp Boca S (1991) Beyond the emotional event Six studies on

the social sharing of emotion Cognition and Emotion 5 435ndash465Scherer KR (1988) Appendix C Questionnaire used in the International Survey on Emotion

Antecedents and Reactions (ISEAR) In KR Scherer (Ed) Facets of emotion Recent researchHillsdale NJ Erlbaum

Sherman JW amp Bessenhoff GR (1999) Stereotypes as source monitoring cues On theinteraction between episodic and semantic memory Psychological Science 10 106ndash110

Stoppard JM amp Gruchy CD (1993) Gender context and expression of positive emotionPersonality and Social Psychology Bulletin 19 143ndash150

Tucker JS amp Riggio RE (1988) The role of social skills in encoding posed and spontaneousfacial expressions Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 12 87ndash97

Wallbott HG amp Scherer KR (1994) Cultural determinants in experiencing shame and guilt InJune Price Tangney amp Kurt W Fischer (Eds) Self conscious emotions The psychology of shameand guilt embarrasment and pride (pp 465ndash487) New York Guilford Press

642 HESS ET AL

asks specific questions regarding the appraisal process We added a section inwhich we asked participants to complete an emotion profile for the event Toavoid the possibility that men and women would relate narratives from widelydifferent types of situations we asked participants to describe an event related tofamily interactions This class of situations should be readily accessible to allparticipants and ensure that emotional events involving human interactionpartners were reported

Allowing participants to choose the type of emotional events they report hasseveral advantages Most importantly we can assess what type of emotionalevents men and women choose to report spontaneously It also permitsparticipants to choose a salient event for which they can recollect theinformation necessary to respond to the appraisal questions On the other handthis approach is unlikely to result in a well-balanced distribution of emotiontopics thus making it difficult or impossible to analyse the data separately fordifferent emotion themes Yet in the context of the present study we were onlyinterested in sex differences in reports and not in absolute levels of responsesStudies 1 and 2 suggest that sex differences are very stable across all negativeemotions We therefore decided to allow participants to choose the emotiontheme and analysed the data collapsed across all negative emotion themes

Method

Participants A total of 171 students 87 men and 84 women with a meanage of 1862 years participated in this study Most of the participants (147) wererecruited from an ethnically homogenous junior college in the larger Montrealurban area (Cegep Lionel-Groulx Ste-Therese Quebec Canada) and partici-pated in groups An additional 24 participants were recruited individually

Procedure The experimenter explained that the study concerned emotionalevents in peoplersquos lives Participants were informed of their right to discontinueparticipation at any time and for any reason The experimenter then distributedthe questionnaires and responded to questions regarding the procedure The tasktook between 10 and 30 minutes Most of this time difference can be attributedto the amount of detail provided in the event description that ranged from acouple of words (eg birth of my daughter) to well over a page

Dependent measures The questionnaire consisted of four parts The firstpart was an open-ended question asking the participants to describe any eventinvolving their family life that led them to experience an emotion Sadnessshame anger guilt joy fear and disgust were provided as examples ofemotions Participants were asked to give a detailed description of the situationincluding the events that led up to it their reactions and those of others presentIn addition they were asked to identify the people involved with respect to their

636 HESS ET AL

relationship with them (eg my partner my sister etc) as well as to identify themain emotion theme of the story This served to ensure that the participantsbased their answers to the following questions on a specific event and not on aclass of similar events

Emotion description The second part of the questionnaire consisted ofquestions regarding when the event happened for how long they felt theemotion and the intensity of the core emotion identified as the emotion theme ofthe story Participants were also asked to indicate whether they tried to hide orcontrol their feelings and to what degree This part also contained the emotionprofile used in Studies 1 and 2 Using this measure participants were asked toindicate to what percentage they had felt each of the nine emotions from theprofile

Appraisal questionnaire A series of questions regarding the appraisal processwere used to assess the emotion antecedent events These questions weretranslated from the questionnaire reported by Scherer (1988) Specificallyparticipants were asked to what degree they had expected the situation to occurhow pleasant or unpleasant they considered the event whether the event helpedor hindered them in achieving their aims to what degree they considered that thesituation or the event that caused the emotion was unjust or unfair whether theevent was caused by their own or by someone elsersquos behaviour to what degreethey considered that the behaviour that caused the event would be judged asimproper or immoral by their acquaintances how the event affected theirfeelings about themselves such as their self-esteem or self-confidence andfinally to what degree the event changed their relationships with the peopleinvolved (all on negative-positive 7-point bipolar scales)

In addition participants were given a list of 11 specific potential causes of theevent (caused it myself natural causes act of god etc) They also evaluatedtheir ability to act upon or to cope with the event and its consequences using ascale involving 5 options The last part of the questionnaire consisted ofquestions regarding the participantsrsquo sex their age and whether they werecurrently seeing someone in a love-based relationship and if so for how long

Results

Of the 171 reported emotion events 147 (74 reported by men and 73 reported bywomen) concerned negative emotional events Of these a total of 62 weresadness events 22 were anger events and 11 were guilt events The remainingevents were distributed over a large number of negative emotions

As expected the very low frequency of reports for specific emotion themesmade separate analyses of reports of these events unfeasible We thereforedecided to perform analyses on the data summed over all negative emotionthemes The 24 events with positive emotion themes were obviously excludedfrom these analyses

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 637

Do women report more sadness events and men more anger events Toaddress this question a chi-square test was performed on the frequency withwhich men and women labeled the reported event as a sad versus an anger eventIn line with the results of Studies 1 and 2 we found men to report more angerevents and women to report more sadness events Specifically 14 men and 8women reported anger events and 25 men and 37 women reported sad events w2

= 355 p = 06 d = 42Do women report more intense core emotions than men For the intensity of

the core emotion experienced during the event women reported significantlyhigher levels (M = 593 SD = 101) than men (M = 554 SD = 123) t(145) =222 p = 028 d = 37

Do women and men report different levels of negative emotions across theemotion profile Figure 2 presents the emotion profiles separately for men andwomen An inspection of the profiles shows that overall men report morehappinessserenity whereas women report higher levels of all other emotionsThe profiles are nonparallel F(8 137) = 5877 p lt 001 Post-hoc analysesrevealed a significant sex difference in self-reported sadness with womenreporting higher levels than men To compare the sex differences in the profiles

Figure 2 Emotion profile for menrsquos and womenrsquos self-reported emotional reactions to negativeemotion events (Study 3)

638 HESS ET AL

found in this study with those from Studies 1 and 2 effect sizes were calculatedUsing the same cut-off point as previously (small effect size d = 020) only twodifferences were found to be stable across the three studies Men report higherlevels of happiness for negative emotion events (d = 7022) and women reporthigher levels of sadness (d = 043) As the latter difference may be due to thehigher frequency of reported sadness events by women we also verified whetherwomen report higher levels of sadness when sadness events are excluded fromthe analysis An inspection of the means revealed a marginally significantdifference in the same direction M = 6472 SD = 3247 and M = 5108 SD =3684 for women and men respectively t(83) = 181 p = 074 d = 40

Are there differences in appraisal patterns between men and women Asmentioned earlier the reported differences in emotional reactions could be dueto differences in the perception of the emotion antecedent events Yet nodifferences in appraisal patterns were found suggesting that emotion antecedentevents were perceived similarly In addition despite the more frequent and moreintense reports of sadness women did not report different coping styles thanmen and did not seem to feel more helpless (38 men vs 34 women report thisreaction) In fact women more frequently report that they felt able to lsquolsquoinfluencethe situation positivelyrsquorsquo (19 women vs 9 men report this reaction though thedifference is not significant)

Discussion

Study 3 extended the study of emotion stereotypes and self-perceptions based onvignettes to narratives of emotional events that the participants had in factexperienced themselves The goal of the study was to investigate whether thefindings from Studies 1 and 2 generalise to such recollections of personal eventsThe results strongly suggest this to be the case Women again report higherlevels of sadness for negative emotion events They also report more sad eventsin general Men on the other hand report more anger events as well as morehappiness for negative emotion events as was found in both Studies 1 and 2 Yetno reported differences in appraisal or coping emerged This suggests that theobserved differences in emotional reactions are not due to a bias in the appraisalprocess nor to an inability to act upon the event

If emotion antecedents do not differ why are differences in emotionalreactions reported We suggest that such differences represent an influence ofthe general emotion stereotype on the narrative reconstruction of a personalevent This conclusion is based on the observation of a null effect and thus opento the critique that the present study lacked the power necessary to detect realdifferences in appraisal between men and women To assess this critique wecalculated the absolute mean effect size for the interval-scaled appraisalquestions to be d = 015 To achieve 80 power a sample of 1100 participantswould be needed These data underscore the very slim differences in appraisals

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 639

between men and women making it highly unlikely that the effects observed inthis study are mediated by a difference in appraisal and thus by a difference inthe perception of the underlying event

CONCLUSIONS

The present series of studies had the goal to assess general emotion stereotypesand their influence on self-perceptions of emotional reactions by men andwomen We wanted to both describe these stereotypes in more detail with regardnot only to the modal emotion for a specific event (such as sadness reactions to aloss) but also with regard to the secondary emotions present in these situationsFurther we wanted to assess to what degree such expectations for men andwomen in general are endorsed by individuals for themselves as well as whetherthey would be spontaneously reported when relating a personally experiencedevent

Two gender differences were found to be stable across all three experimentalparadigms Women are expected to be more likely to react with sadness in allnegative emotion situations they expect themselves to be more likely to reactwith sadness as well as to cry and to withdraw more and finally women reportmore sadness in personal events In contrast men are expected to react withmore happinessserenity during negative emotional situations they expectthemselves to react more frequently this way as well as to laugh and smile moreand to be more relaxed They also tend to report more happiness whendescribing negative personal events

Not all general emotion stereotypes were found in the self-perceptionsstudied in Studies 2 and 3 Specifically according to Study 1 women areexpected to be more likely to react with shame and guilt in all negative emotionsituations Yet women did not expect to do so for themselves in situations otherthan shame and guilt situations and in fact men reported to be more likely toreact with shame in a variety of situations Further men and women did notreport any differences with regard to experiences of shame and guilt during thepersonal events

Study 3 included an appraisal questionnaire to address the question whetherthe self-reported differences in emotionality between men and women are due todifferences in the appraisal of the emotion antecedent events or rather to theinfluence of the prevalent norms No differences in appraisals were detectedsuggesting that the self-reported differences may be due to the normative forcesof the general stereotype rather than to appraisal differences

It may be argued that the Study 3 is based on recollections of past events andthat self-reports of emotional experiences represent after the fact reconstructionsthat differ from the actually experienced emotions during the event (seeParkinson amp Manstead 1993) A related argument may be made for Study 2where participants had to estimate the likelihood of their emotional reactions to

640 HESS ET AL

hypothetical events (even though the latter were chosen to be common everydayevents) This may well be true Yet the question remains why did men andwomen reconstruct the events differently in terms of their emotional reactionsThe answer would then be that the prevalent emotion stereotype which islargely endorsed by the population studied influenced this reconstruction Yetas peoplesrsquo sense of self depends on their past histories this would imply thatreconstructions of emotional events in line with emotion stereotypes mayeventually lead individuals to conform more closely to these stereotypes as theybecome more and more part of their emotional history and eventually of theiremotional self

Manuscript received 30 May 1997Revised manuscript received 23 February 2000

REFERENCES

Adams S Kuebli J Boyle PA amp Fivush R (1995) Gender differences in parent-childconversations about past emotions A longitudinal investigation Sex Roles 33 309ndash323

Allen JG amp Haccoun DM (1976) Sex differences in emotionality A multidimensional approachHuman Relations 29 711ndash722

Averill JR (1997) The emotions An integrative approach In R Hogan JA Johnson amp SRBriggs (Eds) Handbook of personality psychology (pp 513ndash541) San Diego CA AcademicPress

Birnbaum DW (1983) Preschoolersrsquo stereotypes about sex differences in emotionality Areaffirmation Journal of Genetic Psychology 143 139ndash140

Briton NJ amp Hall JA (1995) Gender-based expectancies and observer judgements of smilingJournal of Nonverbal Behavior 19 49ndash65

Brody LR amp Hall JA (1993) Gender and emotion In M Lewis amp JM Haviland (Eds)Handbook of emotions (pp 447-460) New York Guilford Press

Crawford J Clippax S Onyx J Gault U amp Benton P (1992) Emotion and genderConstructing meaning from memory London Sage

Dunn J Bretherton I amp Munn P (1987) Conversations about feeling states between mothers andtheir children Developmental Psychology 23 132ndash139

Eagly AH amp Mladinic A (1989) Gender stereotypes and attitudes toward women and menPersonality and Social Psychology Bulletin 15 543ndash558

Ekman P amp Friesen W (1986) A new pan-cultural facial expression of emotion Motivation andEmotion 10 159ndash168

Feldman-Barrett L Robin L Pietromonaco PR amp Eysell KM (1998) Are women the moreemotional sex Evidence from emotional experiences in social context Cognition and Emotion12 555ndash578

Fernandez-Dols J-M amp Ruiz-Belda M-A (1995) Are smiles a sign of happiness Gold medalwinners at the Olympic Games Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 69 1113ndash1119

Fischer A (1993) Sex differences in emotionality Fact or stereotype Feminism and Psychology 3303ndash318

Fivush R (1989) Exploring differences in the emotional content of mother child conversationsabout the past Sex Roles 20 675ndash691

Frank MG amp Ekman P (1993) Not all smiles are created equal The differences betweenenjoyment and nonenjoymen t smiles [Special Issue Current issues in psychological humorresearch] Humor International Journal of Humor Research 6 9ndash26

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 641

Gallois C (1994) Group membership social rules and power A social psychologica l perspectiveon emotional communication Journal of Pragmatics 22 301ndash324

Hall JA (1984) Nonverbal sex differences Communication accuracy and expressive styleBaltimore MD Johns Hopkins University Press

Izard C (1972) Patterns of emotions A new analysis of anxiety and depression New YorkAcademic Press

Jussim L Milbourn M amp Nelson W (1991) Emotional openness Sex-role stereotypes and self-perceptions Representative Research in Social Psychology 19 35ndash52

Kirouac G amp Hess U (1999) Group membership and the decoding of nonverbal behavior In PPhilippot R Feldman amp E Coats (Eds) The social context of nonverbal behavior (pp 182ndash210) New York Cambridge University Press

Kring AM amp Gordon AH (1998) Sex differences in emotion Expression experience andphysiology Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74 686ndash703

LaFrance M amp Banaji M (1992) Toward a reconsideration of the gender-emotion relationship InMS Clark (Ed) Emotion and social behavior Review of personality and social psychology(Vol 14 pp 178ndash201) Newbury Park CA Sage

LaFrance M amp Hecht MA (1995) Why smiles generate leniency Personality and SocialPsychology Bulletin 21 207ndash214

Lazarus RS (1991) Emotion and adaptation Oxford UK Oxford University PressParkinson B amp Manstead ASR (1993) Making sense of emotion in stories and social life

Cognition and Emotion 7 295ndash323Plutchik R (1980) Emotion A psychoevolutionar y synthesis New York Harper amp RowRime B Mesquita B Philippot P amp Boca S (1991) Beyond the emotional event Six studies on

the social sharing of emotion Cognition and Emotion 5 435ndash465Scherer KR (1988) Appendix C Questionnaire used in the International Survey on Emotion

Antecedents and Reactions (ISEAR) In KR Scherer (Ed) Facets of emotion Recent researchHillsdale NJ Erlbaum

Sherman JW amp Bessenhoff GR (1999) Stereotypes as source monitoring cues On theinteraction between episodic and semantic memory Psychological Science 10 106ndash110

Stoppard JM amp Gruchy CD (1993) Gender context and expression of positive emotionPersonality and Social Psychology Bulletin 19 143ndash150

Tucker JS amp Riggio RE (1988) The role of social skills in encoding posed and spontaneousfacial expressions Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 12 87ndash97

Wallbott HG amp Scherer KR (1994) Cultural determinants in experiencing shame and guilt InJune Price Tangney amp Kurt W Fischer (Eds) Self conscious emotions The psychology of shameand guilt embarrasment and pride (pp 465ndash487) New York Guilford Press

642 HESS ET AL

relationship with them (eg my partner my sister etc) as well as to identify themain emotion theme of the story This served to ensure that the participantsbased their answers to the following questions on a specific event and not on aclass of similar events

Emotion description The second part of the questionnaire consisted ofquestions regarding when the event happened for how long they felt theemotion and the intensity of the core emotion identified as the emotion theme ofthe story Participants were also asked to indicate whether they tried to hide orcontrol their feelings and to what degree This part also contained the emotionprofile used in Studies 1 and 2 Using this measure participants were asked toindicate to what percentage they had felt each of the nine emotions from theprofile

Appraisal questionnaire A series of questions regarding the appraisal processwere used to assess the emotion antecedent events These questions weretranslated from the questionnaire reported by Scherer (1988) Specificallyparticipants were asked to what degree they had expected the situation to occurhow pleasant or unpleasant they considered the event whether the event helpedor hindered them in achieving their aims to what degree they considered that thesituation or the event that caused the emotion was unjust or unfair whether theevent was caused by their own or by someone elsersquos behaviour to what degreethey considered that the behaviour that caused the event would be judged asimproper or immoral by their acquaintances how the event affected theirfeelings about themselves such as their self-esteem or self-confidence andfinally to what degree the event changed their relationships with the peopleinvolved (all on negative-positive 7-point bipolar scales)

In addition participants were given a list of 11 specific potential causes of theevent (caused it myself natural causes act of god etc) They also evaluatedtheir ability to act upon or to cope with the event and its consequences using ascale involving 5 options The last part of the questionnaire consisted ofquestions regarding the participantsrsquo sex their age and whether they werecurrently seeing someone in a love-based relationship and if so for how long

Results

Of the 171 reported emotion events 147 (74 reported by men and 73 reported bywomen) concerned negative emotional events Of these a total of 62 weresadness events 22 were anger events and 11 were guilt events The remainingevents were distributed over a large number of negative emotions

As expected the very low frequency of reports for specific emotion themesmade separate analyses of reports of these events unfeasible We thereforedecided to perform analyses on the data summed over all negative emotionthemes The 24 events with positive emotion themes were obviously excludedfrom these analyses

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 637

Do women report more sadness events and men more anger events Toaddress this question a chi-square test was performed on the frequency withwhich men and women labeled the reported event as a sad versus an anger eventIn line with the results of Studies 1 and 2 we found men to report more angerevents and women to report more sadness events Specifically 14 men and 8women reported anger events and 25 men and 37 women reported sad events w2

= 355 p = 06 d = 42Do women report more intense core emotions than men For the intensity of

the core emotion experienced during the event women reported significantlyhigher levels (M = 593 SD = 101) than men (M = 554 SD = 123) t(145) =222 p = 028 d = 37

Do women and men report different levels of negative emotions across theemotion profile Figure 2 presents the emotion profiles separately for men andwomen An inspection of the profiles shows that overall men report morehappinessserenity whereas women report higher levels of all other emotionsThe profiles are nonparallel F(8 137) = 5877 p lt 001 Post-hoc analysesrevealed a significant sex difference in self-reported sadness with womenreporting higher levels than men To compare the sex differences in the profiles

Figure 2 Emotion profile for menrsquos and womenrsquos self-reported emotional reactions to negativeemotion events (Study 3)

638 HESS ET AL

found in this study with those from Studies 1 and 2 effect sizes were calculatedUsing the same cut-off point as previously (small effect size d = 020) only twodifferences were found to be stable across the three studies Men report higherlevels of happiness for negative emotion events (d = 7022) and women reporthigher levels of sadness (d = 043) As the latter difference may be due to thehigher frequency of reported sadness events by women we also verified whetherwomen report higher levels of sadness when sadness events are excluded fromthe analysis An inspection of the means revealed a marginally significantdifference in the same direction M = 6472 SD = 3247 and M = 5108 SD =3684 for women and men respectively t(83) = 181 p = 074 d = 40

Are there differences in appraisal patterns between men and women Asmentioned earlier the reported differences in emotional reactions could be dueto differences in the perception of the emotion antecedent events Yet nodifferences in appraisal patterns were found suggesting that emotion antecedentevents were perceived similarly In addition despite the more frequent and moreintense reports of sadness women did not report different coping styles thanmen and did not seem to feel more helpless (38 men vs 34 women report thisreaction) In fact women more frequently report that they felt able to lsquolsquoinfluencethe situation positivelyrsquorsquo (19 women vs 9 men report this reaction though thedifference is not significant)

Discussion

Study 3 extended the study of emotion stereotypes and self-perceptions based onvignettes to narratives of emotional events that the participants had in factexperienced themselves The goal of the study was to investigate whether thefindings from Studies 1 and 2 generalise to such recollections of personal eventsThe results strongly suggest this to be the case Women again report higherlevels of sadness for negative emotion events They also report more sad eventsin general Men on the other hand report more anger events as well as morehappiness for negative emotion events as was found in both Studies 1 and 2 Yetno reported differences in appraisal or coping emerged This suggests that theobserved differences in emotional reactions are not due to a bias in the appraisalprocess nor to an inability to act upon the event

If emotion antecedents do not differ why are differences in emotionalreactions reported We suggest that such differences represent an influence ofthe general emotion stereotype on the narrative reconstruction of a personalevent This conclusion is based on the observation of a null effect and thus opento the critique that the present study lacked the power necessary to detect realdifferences in appraisal between men and women To assess this critique wecalculated the absolute mean effect size for the interval-scaled appraisalquestions to be d = 015 To achieve 80 power a sample of 1100 participantswould be needed These data underscore the very slim differences in appraisals

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 639

between men and women making it highly unlikely that the effects observed inthis study are mediated by a difference in appraisal and thus by a difference inthe perception of the underlying event

CONCLUSIONS

The present series of studies had the goal to assess general emotion stereotypesand their influence on self-perceptions of emotional reactions by men andwomen We wanted to both describe these stereotypes in more detail with regardnot only to the modal emotion for a specific event (such as sadness reactions to aloss) but also with regard to the secondary emotions present in these situationsFurther we wanted to assess to what degree such expectations for men andwomen in general are endorsed by individuals for themselves as well as whetherthey would be spontaneously reported when relating a personally experiencedevent

Two gender differences were found to be stable across all three experimentalparadigms Women are expected to be more likely to react with sadness in allnegative emotion situations they expect themselves to be more likely to reactwith sadness as well as to cry and to withdraw more and finally women reportmore sadness in personal events In contrast men are expected to react withmore happinessserenity during negative emotional situations they expectthemselves to react more frequently this way as well as to laugh and smile moreand to be more relaxed They also tend to report more happiness whendescribing negative personal events

Not all general emotion stereotypes were found in the self-perceptionsstudied in Studies 2 and 3 Specifically according to Study 1 women areexpected to be more likely to react with shame and guilt in all negative emotionsituations Yet women did not expect to do so for themselves in situations otherthan shame and guilt situations and in fact men reported to be more likely toreact with shame in a variety of situations Further men and women did notreport any differences with regard to experiences of shame and guilt during thepersonal events

Study 3 included an appraisal questionnaire to address the question whetherthe self-reported differences in emotionality between men and women are due todifferences in the appraisal of the emotion antecedent events or rather to theinfluence of the prevalent norms No differences in appraisals were detectedsuggesting that the self-reported differences may be due to the normative forcesof the general stereotype rather than to appraisal differences

It may be argued that the Study 3 is based on recollections of past events andthat self-reports of emotional experiences represent after the fact reconstructionsthat differ from the actually experienced emotions during the event (seeParkinson amp Manstead 1993) A related argument may be made for Study 2where participants had to estimate the likelihood of their emotional reactions to

640 HESS ET AL

hypothetical events (even though the latter were chosen to be common everydayevents) This may well be true Yet the question remains why did men andwomen reconstruct the events differently in terms of their emotional reactionsThe answer would then be that the prevalent emotion stereotype which islargely endorsed by the population studied influenced this reconstruction Yetas peoplesrsquo sense of self depends on their past histories this would imply thatreconstructions of emotional events in line with emotion stereotypes mayeventually lead individuals to conform more closely to these stereotypes as theybecome more and more part of their emotional history and eventually of theiremotional self

Manuscript received 30 May 1997Revised manuscript received 23 February 2000

REFERENCES

Adams S Kuebli J Boyle PA amp Fivush R (1995) Gender differences in parent-childconversations about past emotions A longitudinal investigation Sex Roles 33 309ndash323

Allen JG amp Haccoun DM (1976) Sex differences in emotionality A multidimensional approachHuman Relations 29 711ndash722

Averill JR (1997) The emotions An integrative approach In R Hogan JA Johnson amp SRBriggs (Eds) Handbook of personality psychology (pp 513ndash541) San Diego CA AcademicPress

Birnbaum DW (1983) Preschoolersrsquo stereotypes about sex differences in emotionality Areaffirmation Journal of Genetic Psychology 143 139ndash140

Briton NJ amp Hall JA (1995) Gender-based expectancies and observer judgements of smilingJournal of Nonverbal Behavior 19 49ndash65

Brody LR amp Hall JA (1993) Gender and emotion In M Lewis amp JM Haviland (Eds)Handbook of emotions (pp 447-460) New York Guilford Press

Crawford J Clippax S Onyx J Gault U amp Benton P (1992) Emotion and genderConstructing meaning from memory London Sage

Dunn J Bretherton I amp Munn P (1987) Conversations about feeling states between mothers andtheir children Developmental Psychology 23 132ndash139

Eagly AH amp Mladinic A (1989) Gender stereotypes and attitudes toward women and menPersonality and Social Psychology Bulletin 15 543ndash558

Ekman P amp Friesen W (1986) A new pan-cultural facial expression of emotion Motivation andEmotion 10 159ndash168

Feldman-Barrett L Robin L Pietromonaco PR amp Eysell KM (1998) Are women the moreemotional sex Evidence from emotional experiences in social context Cognition and Emotion12 555ndash578

Fernandez-Dols J-M amp Ruiz-Belda M-A (1995) Are smiles a sign of happiness Gold medalwinners at the Olympic Games Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 69 1113ndash1119

Fischer A (1993) Sex differences in emotionality Fact or stereotype Feminism and Psychology 3303ndash318

Fivush R (1989) Exploring differences in the emotional content of mother child conversationsabout the past Sex Roles 20 675ndash691

Frank MG amp Ekman P (1993) Not all smiles are created equal The differences betweenenjoyment and nonenjoymen t smiles [Special Issue Current issues in psychological humorresearch] Humor International Journal of Humor Research 6 9ndash26

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 641

Gallois C (1994) Group membership social rules and power A social psychologica l perspectiveon emotional communication Journal of Pragmatics 22 301ndash324

Hall JA (1984) Nonverbal sex differences Communication accuracy and expressive styleBaltimore MD Johns Hopkins University Press

Izard C (1972) Patterns of emotions A new analysis of anxiety and depression New YorkAcademic Press

Jussim L Milbourn M amp Nelson W (1991) Emotional openness Sex-role stereotypes and self-perceptions Representative Research in Social Psychology 19 35ndash52

Kirouac G amp Hess U (1999) Group membership and the decoding of nonverbal behavior In PPhilippot R Feldman amp E Coats (Eds) The social context of nonverbal behavior (pp 182ndash210) New York Cambridge University Press

Kring AM amp Gordon AH (1998) Sex differences in emotion Expression experience andphysiology Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74 686ndash703

LaFrance M amp Banaji M (1992) Toward a reconsideration of the gender-emotion relationship InMS Clark (Ed) Emotion and social behavior Review of personality and social psychology(Vol 14 pp 178ndash201) Newbury Park CA Sage

LaFrance M amp Hecht MA (1995) Why smiles generate leniency Personality and SocialPsychology Bulletin 21 207ndash214

Lazarus RS (1991) Emotion and adaptation Oxford UK Oxford University PressParkinson B amp Manstead ASR (1993) Making sense of emotion in stories and social life

Cognition and Emotion 7 295ndash323Plutchik R (1980) Emotion A psychoevolutionar y synthesis New York Harper amp RowRime B Mesquita B Philippot P amp Boca S (1991) Beyond the emotional event Six studies on

the social sharing of emotion Cognition and Emotion 5 435ndash465Scherer KR (1988) Appendix C Questionnaire used in the International Survey on Emotion

Antecedents and Reactions (ISEAR) In KR Scherer (Ed) Facets of emotion Recent researchHillsdale NJ Erlbaum

Sherman JW amp Bessenhoff GR (1999) Stereotypes as source monitoring cues On theinteraction between episodic and semantic memory Psychological Science 10 106ndash110

Stoppard JM amp Gruchy CD (1993) Gender context and expression of positive emotionPersonality and Social Psychology Bulletin 19 143ndash150

Tucker JS amp Riggio RE (1988) The role of social skills in encoding posed and spontaneousfacial expressions Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 12 87ndash97

Wallbott HG amp Scherer KR (1994) Cultural determinants in experiencing shame and guilt InJune Price Tangney amp Kurt W Fischer (Eds) Self conscious emotions The psychology of shameand guilt embarrasment and pride (pp 465ndash487) New York Guilford Press

642 HESS ET AL

Do women report more sadness events and men more anger events Toaddress this question a chi-square test was performed on the frequency withwhich men and women labeled the reported event as a sad versus an anger eventIn line with the results of Studies 1 and 2 we found men to report more angerevents and women to report more sadness events Specifically 14 men and 8women reported anger events and 25 men and 37 women reported sad events w2

= 355 p = 06 d = 42Do women report more intense core emotions than men For the intensity of

the core emotion experienced during the event women reported significantlyhigher levels (M = 593 SD = 101) than men (M = 554 SD = 123) t(145) =222 p = 028 d = 37

Do women and men report different levels of negative emotions across theemotion profile Figure 2 presents the emotion profiles separately for men andwomen An inspection of the profiles shows that overall men report morehappinessserenity whereas women report higher levels of all other emotionsThe profiles are nonparallel F(8 137) = 5877 p lt 001 Post-hoc analysesrevealed a significant sex difference in self-reported sadness with womenreporting higher levels than men To compare the sex differences in the profiles

Figure 2 Emotion profile for menrsquos and womenrsquos self-reported emotional reactions to negativeemotion events (Study 3)

638 HESS ET AL

found in this study with those from Studies 1 and 2 effect sizes were calculatedUsing the same cut-off point as previously (small effect size d = 020) only twodifferences were found to be stable across the three studies Men report higherlevels of happiness for negative emotion events (d = 7022) and women reporthigher levels of sadness (d = 043) As the latter difference may be due to thehigher frequency of reported sadness events by women we also verified whetherwomen report higher levels of sadness when sadness events are excluded fromthe analysis An inspection of the means revealed a marginally significantdifference in the same direction M = 6472 SD = 3247 and M = 5108 SD =3684 for women and men respectively t(83) = 181 p = 074 d = 40

Are there differences in appraisal patterns between men and women Asmentioned earlier the reported differences in emotional reactions could be dueto differences in the perception of the emotion antecedent events Yet nodifferences in appraisal patterns were found suggesting that emotion antecedentevents were perceived similarly In addition despite the more frequent and moreintense reports of sadness women did not report different coping styles thanmen and did not seem to feel more helpless (38 men vs 34 women report thisreaction) In fact women more frequently report that they felt able to lsquolsquoinfluencethe situation positivelyrsquorsquo (19 women vs 9 men report this reaction though thedifference is not significant)

Discussion

Study 3 extended the study of emotion stereotypes and self-perceptions based onvignettes to narratives of emotional events that the participants had in factexperienced themselves The goal of the study was to investigate whether thefindings from Studies 1 and 2 generalise to such recollections of personal eventsThe results strongly suggest this to be the case Women again report higherlevels of sadness for negative emotion events They also report more sad eventsin general Men on the other hand report more anger events as well as morehappiness for negative emotion events as was found in both Studies 1 and 2 Yetno reported differences in appraisal or coping emerged This suggests that theobserved differences in emotional reactions are not due to a bias in the appraisalprocess nor to an inability to act upon the event

If emotion antecedents do not differ why are differences in emotionalreactions reported We suggest that such differences represent an influence ofthe general emotion stereotype on the narrative reconstruction of a personalevent This conclusion is based on the observation of a null effect and thus opento the critique that the present study lacked the power necessary to detect realdifferences in appraisal between men and women To assess this critique wecalculated the absolute mean effect size for the interval-scaled appraisalquestions to be d = 015 To achieve 80 power a sample of 1100 participantswould be needed These data underscore the very slim differences in appraisals

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 639

between men and women making it highly unlikely that the effects observed inthis study are mediated by a difference in appraisal and thus by a difference inthe perception of the underlying event

CONCLUSIONS

The present series of studies had the goal to assess general emotion stereotypesand their influence on self-perceptions of emotional reactions by men andwomen We wanted to both describe these stereotypes in more detail with regardnot only to the modal emotion for a specific event (such as sadness reactions to aloss) but also with regard to the secondary emotions present in these situationsFurther we wanted to assess to what degree such expectations for men andwomen in general are endorsed by individuals for themselves as well as whetherthey would be spontaneously reported when relating a personally experiencedevent

Two gender differences were found to be stable across all three experimentalparadigms Women are expected to be more likely to react with sadness in allnegative emotion situations they expect themselves to be more likely to reactwith sadness as well as to cry and to withdraw more and finally women reportmore sadness in personal events In contrast men are expected to react withmore happinessserenity during negative emotional situations they expectthemselves to react more frequently this way as well as to laugh and smile moreand to be more relaxed They also tend to report more happiness whendescribing negative personal events

Not all general emotion stereotypes were found in the self-perceptionsstudied in Studies 2 and 3 Specifically according to Study 1 women areexpected to be more likely to react with shame and guilt in all negative emotionsituations Yet women did not expect to do so for themselves in situations otherthan shame and guilt situations and in fact men reported to be more likely toreact with shame in a variety of situations Further men and women did notreport any differences with regard to experiences of shame and guilt during thepersonal events

Study 3 included an appraisal questionnaire to address the question whetherthe self-reported differences in emotionality between men and women are due todifferences in the appraisal of the emotion antecedent events or rather to theinfluence of the prevalent norms No differences in appraisals were detectedsuggesting that the self-reported differences may be due to the normative forcesof the general stereotype rather than to appraisal differences

It may be argued that the Study 3 is based on recollections of past events andthat self-reports of emotional experiences represent after the fact reconstructionsthat differ from the actually experienced emotions during the event (seeParkinson amp Manstead 1993) A related argument may be made for Study 2where participants had to estimate the likelihood of their emotional reactions to

640 HESS ET AL

hypothetical events (even though the latter were chosen to be common everydayevents) This may well be true Yet the question remains why did men andwomen reconstruct the events differently in terms of their emotional reactionsThe answer would then be that the prevalent emotion stereotype which islargely endorsed by the population studied influenced this reconstruction Yetas peoplesrsquo sense of self depends on their past histories this would imply thatreconstructions of emotional events in line with emotion stereotypes mayeventually lead individuals to conform more closely to these stereotypes as theybecome more and more part of their emotional history and eventually of theiremotional self

Manuscript received 30 May 1997Revised manuscript received 23 February 2000

REFERENCES

Adams S Kuebli J Boyle PA amp Fivush R (1995) Gender differences in parent-childconversations about past emotions A longitudinal investigation Sex Roles 33 309ndash323

Allen JG amp Haccoun DM (1976) Sex differences in emotionality A multidimensional approachHuman Relations 29 711ndash722

Averill JR (1997) The emotions An integrative approach In R Hogan JA Johnson amp SRBriggs (Eds) Handbook of personality psychology (pp 513ndash541) San Diego CA AcademicPress

Birnbaum DW (1983) Preschoolersrsquo stereotypes about sex differences in emotionality Areaffirmation Journal of Genetic Psychology 143 139ndash140

Briton NJ amp Hall JA (1995) Gender-based expectancies and observer judgements of smilingJournal of Nonverbal Behavior 19 49ndash65

Brody LR amp Hall JA (1993) Gender and emotion In M Lewis amp JM Haviland (Eds)Handbook of emotions (pp 447-460) New York Guilford Press

Crawford J Clippax S Onyx J Gault U amp Benton P (1992) Emotion and genderConstructing meaning from memory London Sage

Dunn J Bretherton I amp Munn P (1987) Conversations about feeling states between mothers andtheir children Developmental Psychology 23 132ndash139

Eagly AH amp Mladinic A (1989) Gender stereotypes and attitudes toward women and menPersonality and Social Psychology Bulletin 15 543ndash558

Ekman P amp Friesen W (1986) A new pan-cultural facial expression of emotion Motivation andEmotion 10 159ndash168

Feldman-Barrett L Robin L Pietromonaco PR amp Eysell KM (1998) Are women the moreemotional sex Evidence from emotional experiences in social context Cognition and Emotion12 555ndash578

Fernandez-Dols J-M amp Ruiz-Belda M-A (1995) Are smiles a sign of happiness Gold medalwinners at the Olympic Games Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 69 1113ndash1119

Fischer A (1993) Sex differences in emotionality Fact or stereotype Feminism and Psychology 3303ndash318

Fivush R (1989) Exploring differences in the emotional content of mother child conversationsabout the past Sex Roles 20 675ndash691

Frank MG amp Ekman P (1993) Not all smiles are created equal The differences betweenenjoyment and nonenjoymen t smiles [Special Issue Current issues in psychological humorresearch] Humor International Journal of Humor Research 6 9ndash26

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 641

Gallois C (1994) Group membership social rules and power A social psychologica l perspectiveon emotional communication Journal of Pragmatics 22 301ndash324

Hall JA (1984) Nonverbal sex differences Communication accuracy and expressive styleBaltimore MD Johns Hopkins University Press

Izard C (1972) Patterns of emotions A new analysis of anxiety and depression New YorkAcademic Press

Jussim L Milbourn M amp Nelson W (1991) Emotional openness Sex-role stereotypes and self-perceptions Representative Research in Social Psychology 19 35ndash52

Kirouac G amp Hess U (1999) Group membership and the decoding of nonverbal behavior In PPhilippot R Feldman amp E Coats (Eds) The social context of nonverbal behavior (pp 182ndash210) New York Cambridge University Press

Kring AM amp Gordon AH (1998) Sex differences in emotion Expression experience andphysiology Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74 686ndash703

LaFrance M amp Banaji M (1992) Toward a reconsideration of the gender-emotion relationship InMS Clark (Ed) Emotion and social behavior Review of personality and social psychology(Vol 14 pp 178ndash201) Newbury Park CA Sage

LaFrance M amp Hecht MA (1995) Why smiles generate leniency Personality and SocialPsychology Bulletin 21 207ndash214

Lazarus RS (1991) Emotion and adaptation Oxford UK Oxford University PressParkinson B amp Manstead ASR (1993) Making sense of emotion in stories and social life

Cognition and Emotion 7 295ndash323Plutchik R (1980) Emotion A psychoevolutionar y synthesis New York Harper amp RowRime B Mesquita B Philippot P amp Boca S (1991) Beyond the emotional event Six studies on

the social sharing of emotion Cognition and Emotion 5 435ndash465Scherer KR (1988) Appendix C Questionnaire used in the International Survey on Emotion

Antecedents and Reactions (ISEAR) In KR Scherer (Ed) Facets of emotion Recent researchHillsdale NJ Erlbaum

Sherman JW amp Bessenhoff GR (1999) Stereotypes as source monitoring cues On theinteraction between episodic and semantic memory Psychological Science 10 106ndash110

Stoppard JM amp Gruchy CD (1993) Gender context and expression of positive emotionPersonality and Social Psychology Bulletin 19 143ndash150

Tucker JS amp Riggio RE (1988) The role of social skills in encoding posed and spontaneousfacial expressions Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 12 87ndash97

Wallbott HG amp Scherer KR (1994) Cultural determinants in experiencing shame and guilt InJune Price Tangney amp Kurt W Fischer (Eds) Self conscious emotions The psychology of shameand guilt embarrasment and pride (pp 465ndash487) New York Guilford Press

642 HESS ET AL

found in this study with those from Studies 1 and 2 effect sizes were calculatedUsing the same cut-off point as previously (small effect size d = 020) only twodifferences were found to be stable across the three studies Men report higherlevels of happiness for negative emotion events (d = 7022) and women reporthigher levels of sadness (d = 043) As the latter difference may be due to thehigher frequency of reported sadness events by women we also verified whetherwomen report higher levels of sadness when sadness events are excluded fromthe analysis An inspection of the means revealed a marginally significantdifference in the same direction M = 6472 SD = 3247 and M = 5108 SD =3684 for women and men respectively t(83) = 181 p = 074 d = 40

Are there differences in appraisal patterns between men and women Asmentioned earlier the reported differences in emotional reactions could be dueto differences in the perception of the emotion antecedent events Yet nodifferences in appraisal patterns were found suggesting that emotion antecedentevents were perceived similarly In addition despite the more frequent and moreintense reports of sadness women did not report different coping styles thanmen and did not seem to feel more helpless (38 men vs 34 women report thisreaction) In fact women more frequently report that they felt able to lsquolsquoinfluencethe situation positivelyrsquorsquo (19 women vs 9 men report this reaction though thedifference is not significant)

Discussion

Study 3 extended the study of emotion stereotypes and self-perceptions based onvignettes to narratives of emotional events that the participants had in factexperienced themselves The goal of the study was to investigate whether thefindings from Studies 1 and 2 generalise to such recollections of personal eventsThe results strongly suggest this to be the case Women again report higherlevels of sadness for negative emotion events They also report more sad eventsin general Men on the other hand report more anger events as well as morehappiness for negative emotion events as was found in both Studies 1 and 2 Yetno reported differences in appraisal or coping emerged This suggests that theobserved differences in emotional reactions are not due to a bias in the appraisalprocess nor to an inability to act upon the event

If emotion antecedents do not differ why are differences in emotionalreactions reported We suggest that such differences represent an influence ofthe general emotion stereotype on the narrative reconstruction of a personalevent This conclusion is based on the observation of a null effect and thus opento the critique that the present study lacked the power necessary to detect realdifferences in appraisal between men and women To assess this critique wecalculated the absolute mean effect size for the interval-scaled appraisalquestions to be d = 015 To achieve 80 power a sample of 1100 participantswould be needed These data underscore the very slim differences in appraisals

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 639

between men and women making it highly unlikely that the effects observed inthis study are mediated by a difference in appraisal and thus by a difference inthe perception of the underlying event

CONCLUSIONS

The present series of studies had the goal to assess general emotion stereotypesand their influence on self-perceptions of emotional reactions by men andwomen We wanted to both describe these stereotypes in more detail with regardnot only to the modal emotion for a specific event (such as sadness reactions to aloss) but also with regard to the secondary emotions present in these situationsFurther we wanted to assess to what degree such expectations for men andwomen in general are endorsed by individuals for themselves as well as whetherthey would be spontaneously reported when relating a personally experiencedevent

Two gender differences were found to be stable across all three experimentalparadigms Women are expected to be more likely to react with sadness in allnegative emotion situations they expect themselves to be more likely to reactwith sadness as well as to cry and to withdraw more and finally women reportmore sadness in personal events In contrast men are expected to react withmore happinessserenity during negative emotional situations they expectthemselves to react more frequently this way as well as to laugh and smile moreand to be more relaxed They also tend to report more happiness whendescribing negative personal events

Not all general emotion stereotypes were found in the self-perceptionsstudied in Studies 2 and 3 Specifically according to Study 1 women areexpected to be more likely to react with shame and guilt in all negative emotionsituations Yet women did not expect to do so for themselves in situations otherthan shame and guilt situations and in fact men reported to be more likely toreact with shame in a variety of situations Further men and women did notreport any differences with regard to experiences of shame and guilt during thepersonal events

Study 3 included an appraisal questionnaire to address the question whetherthe self-reported differences in emotionality between men and women are due todifferences in the appraisal of the emotion antecedent events or rather to theinfluence of the prevalent norms No differences in appraisals were detectedsuggesting that the self-reported differences may be due to the normative forcesof the general stereotype rather than to appraisal differences

It may be argued that the Study 3 is based on recollections of past events andthat self-reports of emotional experiences represent after the fact reconstructionsthat differ from the actually experienced emotions during the event (seeParkinson amp Manstead 1993) A related argument may be made for Study 2where participants had to estimate the likelihood of their emotional reactions to

640 HESS ET AL

hypothetical events (even though the latter were chosen to be common everydayevents) This may well be true Yet the question remains why did men andwomen reconstruct the events differently in terms of their emotional reactionsThe answer would then be that the prevalent emotion stereotype which islargely endorsed by the population studied influenced this reconstruction Yetas peoplesrsquo sense of self depends on their past histories this would imply thatreconstructions of emotional events in line with emotion stereotypes mayeventually lead individuals to conform more closely to these stereotypes as theybecome more and more part of their emotional history and eventually of theiremotional self

Manuscript received 30 May 1997Revised manuscript received 23 February 2000

REFERENCES

Adams S Kuebli J Boyle PA amp Fivush R (1995) Gender differences in parent-childconversations about past emotions A longitudinal investigation Sex Roles 33 309ndash323

Allen JG amp Haccoun DM (1976) Sex differences in emotionality A multidimensional approachHuman Relations 29 711ndash722

Averill JR (1997) The emotions An integrative approach In R Hogan JA Johnson amp SRBriggs (Eds) Handbook of personality psychology (pp 513ndash541) San Diego CA AcademicPress

Birnbaum DW (1983) Preschoolersrsquo stereotypes about sex differences in emotionality Areaffirmation Journal of Genetic Psychology 143 139ndash140

Briton NJ amp Hall JA (1995) Gender-based expectancies and observer judgements of smilingJournal of Nonverbal Behavior 19 49ndash65

Brody LR amp Hall JA (1993) Gender and emotion In M Lewis amp JM Haviland (Eds)Handbook of emotions (pp 447-460) New York Guilford Press

Crawford J Clippax S Onyx J Gault U amp Benton P (1992) Emotion and genderConstructing meaning from memory London Sage

Dunn J Bretherton I amp Munn P (1987) Conversations about feeling states between mothers andtheir children Developmental Psychology 23 132ndash139

Eagly AH amp Mladinic A (1989) Gender stereotypes and attitudes toward women and menPersonality and Social Psychology Bulletin 15 543ndash558

Ekman P amp Friesen W (1986) A new pan-cultural facial expression of emotion Motivation andEmotion 10 159ndash168

Feldman-Barrett L Robin L Pietromonaco PR amp Eysell KM (1998) Are women the moreemotional sex Evidence from emotional experiences in social context Cognition and Emotion12 555ndash578

Fernandez-Dols J-M amp Ruiz-Belda M-A (1995) Are smiles a sign of happiness Gold medalwinners at the Olympic Games Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 69 1113ndash1119

Fischer A (1993) Sex differences in emotionality Fact or stereotype Feminism and Psychology 3303ndash318

Fivush R (1989) Exploring differences in the emotional content of mother child conversationsabout the past Sex Roles 20 675ndash691

Frank MG amp Ekman P (1993) Not all smiles are created equal The differences betweenenjoyment and nonenjoymen t smiles [Special Issue Current issues in psychological humorresearch] Humor International Journal of Humor Research 6 9ndash26

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 641

Gallois C (1994) Group membership social rules and power A social psychologica l perspectiveon emotional communication Journal of Pragmatics 22 301ndash324

Hall JA (1984) Nonverbal sex differences Communication accuracy and expressive styleBaltimore MD Johns Hopkins University Press

Izard C (1972) Patterns of emotions A new analysis of anxiety and depression New YorkAcademic Press

Jussim L Milbourn M amp Nelson W (1991) Emotional openness Sex-role stereotypes and self-perceptions Representative Research in Social Psychology 19 35ndash52

Kirouac G amp Hess U (1999) Group membership and the decoding of nonverbal behavior In PPhilippot R Feldman amp E Coats (Eds) The social context of nonverbal behavior (pp 182ndash210) New York Cambridge University Press

Kring AM amp Gordon AH (1998) Sex differences in emotion Expression experience andphysiology Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74 686ndash703

LaFrance M amp Banaji M (1992) Toward a reconsideration of the gender-emotion relationship InMS Clark (Ed) Emotion and social behavior Review of personality and social psychology(Vol 14 pp 178ndash201) Newbury Park CA Sage

LaFrance M amp Hecht MA (1995) Why smiles generate leniency Personality and SocialPsychology Bulletin 21 207ndash214

Lazarus RS (1991) Emotion and adaptation Oxford UK Oxford University PressParkinson B amp Manstead ASR (1993) Making sense of emotion in stories and social life

Cognition and Emotion 7 295ndash323Plutchik R (1980) Emotion A psychoevolutionar y synthesis New York Harper amp RowRime B Mesquita B Philippot P amp Boca S (1991) Beyond the emotional event Six studies on

the social sharing of emotion Cognition and Emotion 5 435ndash465Scherer KR (1988) Appendix C Questionnaire used in the International Survey on Emotion

Antecedents and Reactions (ISEAR) In KR Scherer (Ed) Facets of emotion Recent researchHillsdale NJ Erlbaum

Sherman JW amp Bessenhoff GR (1999) Stereotypes as source monitoring cues On theinteraction between episodic and semantic memory Psychological Science 10 106ndash110

Stoppard JM amp Gruchy CD (1993) Gender context and expression of positive emotionPersonality and Social Psychology Bulletin 19 143ndash150

Tucker JS amp Riggio RE (1988) The role of social skills in encoding posed and spontaneousfacial expressions Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 12 87ndash97

Wallbott HG amp Scherer KR (1994) Cultural determinants in experiencing shame and guilt InJune Price Tangney amp Kurt W Fischer (Eds) Self conscious emotions The psychology of shameand guilt embarrasment and pride (pp 465ndash487) New York Guilford Press

642 HESS ET AL

between men and women making it highly unlikely that the effects observed inthis study are mediated by a difference in appraisal and thus by a difference inthe perception of the underlying event

CONCLUSIONS

The present series of studies had the goal to assess general emotion stereotypesand their influence on self-perceptions of emotional reactions by men andwomen We wanted to both describe these stereotypes in more detail with regardnot only to the modal emotion for a specific event (such as sadness reactions to aloss) but also with regard to the secondary emotions present in these situationsFurther we wanted to assess to what degree such expectations for men andwomen in general are endorsed by individuals for themselves as well as whetherthey would be spontaneously reported when relating a personally experiencedevent

Two gender differences were found to be stable across all three experimentalparadigms Women are expected to be more likely to react with sadness in allnegative emotion situations they expect themselves to be more likely to reactwith sadness as well as to cry and to withdraw more and finally women reportmore sadness in personal events In contrast men are expected to react withmore happinessserenity during negative emotional situations they expectthemselves to react more frequently this way as well as to laugh and smile moreand to be more relaxed They also tend to report more happiness whendescribing negative personal events

Not all general emotion stereotypes were found in the self-perceptionsstudied in Studies 2 and 3 Specifically according to Study 1 women areexpected to be more likely to react with shame and guilt in all negative emotionsituations Yet women did not expect to do so for themselves in situations otherthan shame and guilt situations and in fact men reported to be more likely toreact with shame in a variety of situations Further men and women did notreport any differences with regard to experiences of shame and guilt during thepersonal events

Study 3 included an appraisal questionnaire to address the question whetherthe self-reported differences in emotionality between men and women are due todifferences in the appraisal of the emotion antecedent events or rather to theinfluence of the prevalent norms No differences in appraisals were detectedsuggesting that the self-reported differences may be due to the normative forcesof the general stereotype rather than to appraisal differences

It may be argued that the Study 3 is based on recollections of past events andthat self-reports of emotional experiences represent after the fact reconstructionsthat differ from the actually experienced emotions during the event (seeParkinson amp Manstead 1993) A related argument may be made for Study 2where participants had to estimate the likelihood of their emotional reactions to

640 HESS ET AL

hypothetical events (even though the latter were chosen to be common everydayevents) This may well be true Yet the question remains why did men andwomen reconstruct the events differently in terms of their emotional reactionsThe answer would then be that the prevalent emotion stereotype which islargely endorsed by the population studied influenced this reconstruction Yetas peoplesrsquo sense of self depends on their past histories this would imply thatreconstructions of emotional events in line with emotion stereotypes mayeventually lead individuals to conform more closely to these stereotypes as theybecome more and more part of their emotional history and eventually of theiremotional self

Manuscript received 30 May 1997Revised manuscript received 23 February 2000

REFERENCES

Adams S Kuebli J Boyle PA amp Fivush R (1995) Gender differences in parent-childconversations about past emotions A longitudinal investigation Sex Roles 33 309ndash323

Allen JG amp Haccoun DM (1976) Sex differences in emotionality A multidimensional approachHuman Relations 29 711ndash722

Averill JR (1997) The emotions An integrative approach In R Hogan JA Johnson amp SRBriggs (Eds) Handbook of personality psychology (pp 513ndash541) San Diego CA AcademicPress

Birnbaum DW (1983) Preschoolersrsquo stereotypes about sex differences in emotionality Areaffirmation Journal of Genetic Psychology 143 139ndash140

Briton NJ amp Hall JA (1995) Gender-based expectancies and observer judgements of smilingJournal of Nonverbal Behavior 19 49ndash65

Brody LR amp Hall JA (1993) Gender and emotion In M Lewis amp JM Haviland (Eds)Handbook of emotions (pp 447-460) New York Guilford Press

Crawford J Clippax S Onyx J Gault U amp Benton P (1992) Emotion and genderConstructing meaning from memory London Sage

Dunn J Bretherton I amp Munn P (1987) Conversations about feeling states between mothers andtheir children Developmental Psychology 23 132ndash139

Eagly AH amp Mladinic A (1989) Gender stereotypes and attitudes toward women and menPersonality and Social Psychology Bulletin 15 543ndash558

Ekman P amp Friesen W (1986) A new pan-cultural facial expression of emotion Motivation andEmotion 10 159ndash168

Feldman-Barrett L Robin L Pietromonaco PR amp Eysell KM (1998) Are women the moreemotional sex Evidence from emotional experiences in social context Cognition and Emotion12 555ndash578

Fernandez-Dols J-M amp Ruiz-Belda M-A (1995) Are smiles a sign of happiness Gold medalwinners at the Olympic Games Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 69 1113ndash1119

Fischer A (1993) Sex differences in emotionality Fact or stereotype Feminism and Psychology 3303ndash318

Fivush R (1989) Exploring differences in the emotional content of mother child conversationsabout the past Sex Roles 20 675ndash691

Frank MG amp Ekman P (1993) Not all smiles are created equal The differences betweenenjoyment and nonenjoymen t smiles [Special Issue Current issues in psychological humorresearch] Humor International Journal of Humor Research 6 9ndash26

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 641

Gallois C (1994) Group membership social rules and power A social psychologica l perspectiveon emotional communication Journal of Pragmatics 22 301ndash324

Hall JA (1984) Nonverbal sex differences Communication accuracy and expressive styleBaltimore MD Johns Hopkins University Press

Izard C (1972) Patterns of emotions A new analysis of anxiety and depression New YorkAcademic Press

Jussim L Milbourn M amp Nelson W (1991) Emotional openness Sex-role stereotypes and self-perceptions Representative Research in Social Psychology 19 35ndash52

Kirouac G amp Hess U (1999) Group membership and the decoding of nonverbal behavior In PPhilippot R Feldman amp E Coats (Eds) The social context of nonverbal behavior (pp 182ndash210) New York Cambridge University Press

Kring AM amp Gordon AH (1998) Sex differences in emotion Expression experience andphysiology Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74 686ndash703

LaFrance M amp Banaji M (1992) Toward a reconsideration of the gender-emotion relationship InMS Clark (Ed) Emotion and social behavior Review of personality and social psychology(Vol 14 pp 178ndash201) Newbury Park CA Sage

LaFrance M amp Hecht MA (1995) Why smiles generate leniency Personality and SocialPsychology Bulletin 21 207ndash214

Lazarus RS (1991) Emotion and adaptation Oxford UK Oxford University PressParkinson B amp Manstead ASR (1993) Making sense of emotion in stories and social life

Cognition and Emotion 7 295ndash323Plutchik R (1980) Emotion A psychoevolutionar y synthesis New York Harper amp RowRime B Mesquita B Philippot P amp Boca S (1991) Beyond the emotional event Six studies on

the social sharing of emotion Cognition and Emotion 5 435ndash465Scherer KR (1988) Appendix C Questionnaire used in the International Survey on Emotion

Antecedents and Reactions (ISEAR) In KR Scherer (Ed) Facets of emotion Recent researchHillsdale NJ Erlbaum

Sherman JW amp Bessenhoff GR (1999) Stereotypes as source monitoring cues On theinteraction between episodic and semantic memory Psychological Science 10 106ndash110

Stoppard JM amp Gruchy CD (1993) Gender context and expression of positive emotionPersonality and Social Psychology Bulletin 19 143ndash150

Tucker JS amp Riggio RE (1988) The role of social skills in encoding posed and spontaneousfacial expressions Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 12 87ndash97

Wallbott HG amp Scherer KR (1994) Cultural determinants in experiencing shame and guilt InJune Price Tangney amp Kurt W Fischer (Eds) Self conscious emotions The psychology of shameand guilt embarrasment and pride (pp 465ndash487) New York Guilford Press

642 HESS ET AL

hypothetical events (even though the latter were chosen to be common everydayevents) This may well be true Yet the question remains why did men andwomen reconstruct the events differently in terms of their emotional reactionsThe answer would then be that the prevalent emotion stereotype which islargely endorsed by the population studied influenced this reconstruction Yetas peoplesrsquo sense of self depends on their past histories this would imply thatreconstructions of emotional events in line with emotion stereotypes mayeventually lead individuals to conform more closely to these stereotypes as theybecome more and more part of their emotional history and eventually of theiremotional self

Manuscript received 30 May 1997Revised manuscript received 23 February 2000

REFERENCES

Adams S Kuebli J Boyle PA amp Fivush R (1995) Gender differences in parent-childconversations about past emotions A longitudinal investigation Sex Roles 33 309ndash323

Allen JG amp Haccoun DM (1976) Sex differences in emotionality A multidimensional approachHuman Relations 29 711ndash722

Averill JR (1997) The emotions An integrative approach In R Hogan JA Johnson amp SRBriggs (Eds) Handbook of personality psychology (pp 513ndash541) San Diego CA AcademicPress

Birnbaum DW (1983) Preschoolersrsquo stereotypes about sex differences in emotionality Areaffirmation Journal of Genetic Psychology 143 139ndash140

Briton NJ amp Hall JA (1995) Gender-based expectancies and observer judgements of smilingJournal of Nonverbal Behavior 19 49ndash65

Brody LR amp Hall JA (1993) Gender and emotion In M Lewis amp JM Haviland (Eds)Handbook of emotions (pp 447-460) New York Guilford Press

Crawford J Clippax S Onyx J Gault U amp Benton P (1992) Emotion and genderConstructing meaning from memory London Sage

Dunn J Bretherton I amp Munn P (1987) Conversations about feeling states between mothers andtheir children Developmental Psychology 23 132ndash139

Eagly AH amp Mladinic A (1989) Gender stereotypes and attitudes toward women and menPersonality and Social Psychology Bulletin 15 543ndash558

Ekman P amp Friesen W (1986) A new pan-cultural facial expression of emotion Motivation andEmotion 10 159ndash168

Feldman-Barrett L Robin L Pietromonaco PR amp Eysell KM (1998) Are women the moreemotional sex Evidence from emotional experiences in social context Cognition and Emotion12 555ndash578

Fernandez-Dols J-M amp Ruiz-Belda M-A (1995) Are smiles a sign of happiness Gold medalwinners at the Olympic Games Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 69 1113ndash1119

Fischer A (1993) Sex differences in emotionality Fact or stereotype Feminism and Psychology 3303ndash318

Fivush R (1989) Exploring differences in the emotional content of mother child conversationsabout the past Sex Roles 20 675ndash691

Frank MG amp Ekman P (1993) Not all smiles are created equal The differences betweenenjoyment and nonenjoymen t smiles [Special Issue Current issues in psychological humorresearch] Humor International Journal of Humor Research 6 9ndash26

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVITY 641

Gallois C (1994) Group membership social rules and power A social psychologica l perspectiveon emotional communication Journal of Pragmatics 22 301ndash324

Hall JA (1984) Nonverbal sex differences Communication accuracy and expressive styleBaltimore MD Johns Hopkins University Press

Izard C (1972) Patterns of emotions A new analysis of anxiety and depression New YorkAcademic Press

Jussim L Milbourn M amp Nelson W (1991) Emotional openness Sex-role stereotypes and self-perceptions Representative Research in Social Psychology 19 35ndash52

Kirouac G amp Hess U (1999) Group membership and the decoding of nonverbal behavior In PPhilippot R Feldman amp E Coats (Eds) The social context of nonverbal behavior (pp 182ndash210) New York Cambridge University Press

Kring AM amp Gordon AH (1998) Sex differences in emotion Expression experience andphysiology Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74 686ndash703

LaFrance M amp Banaji M (1992) Toward a reconsideration of the gender-emotion relationship InMS Clark (Ed) Emotion and social behavior Review of personality and social psychology(Vol 14 pp 178ndash201) Newbury Park CA Sage

LaFrance M amp Hecht MA (1995) Why smiles generate leniency Personality and SocialPsychology Bulletin 21 207ndash214

Lazarus RS (1991) Emotion and adaptation Oxford UK Oxford University PressParkinson B amp Manstead ASR (1993) Making sense of emotion in stories and social life

Cognition and Emotion 7 295ndash323Plutchik R (1980) Emotion A psychoevolutionar y synthesis New York Harper amp RowRime B Mesquita B Philippot P amp Boca S (1991) Beyond the emotional event Six studies on

the social sharing of emotion Cognition and Emotion 5 435ndash465Scherer KR (1988) Appendix C Questionnaire used in the International Survey on Emotion

Antecedents and Reactions (ISEAR) In KR Scherer (Ed) Facets of emotion Recent researchHillsdale NJ Erlbaum

Sherman JW amp Bessenhoff GR (1999) Stereotypes as source monitoring cues On theinteraction between episodic and semantic memory Psychological Science 10 106ndash110

Stoppard JM amp Gruchy CD (1993) Gender context and expression of positive emotionPersonality and Social Psychology Bulletin 19 143ndash150

Tucker JS amp Riggio RE (1988) The role of social skills in encoding posed and spontaneousfacial expressions Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 12 87ndash97

Wallbott HG amp Scherer KR (1994) Cultural determinants in experiencing shame and guilt InJune Price Tangney amp Kurt W Fischer (Eds) Self conscious emotions The psychology of shameand guilt embarrasment and pride (pp 465ndash487) New York Guilford Press

642 HESS ET AL

Gallois C (1994) Group membership social rules and power A social psychologica l perspectiveon emotional communication Journal of Pragmatics 22 301ndash324

Hall JA (1984) Nonverbal sex differences Communication accuracy and expressive styleBaltimore MD Johns Hopkins University Press

Izard C (1972) Patterns of emotions A new analysis of anxiety and depression New YorkAcademic Press

Jussim L Milbourn M amp Nelson W (1991) Emotional openness Sex-role stereotypes and self-perceptions Representative Research in Social Psychology 19 35ndash52

Kirouac G amp Hess U (1999) Group membership and the decoding of nonverbal behavior In PPhilippot R Feldman amp E Coats (Eds) The social context of nonverbal behavior (pp 182ndash210) New York Cambridge University Press

Kring AM amp Gordon AH (1998) Sex differences in emotion Expression experience andphysiology Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74 686ndash703

LaFrance M amp Banaji M (1992) Toward a reconsideration of the gender-emotion relationship InMS Clark (Ed) Emotion and social behavior Review of personality and social psychology(Vol 14 pp 178ndash201) Newbury Park CA Sage

LaFrance M amp Hecht MA (1995) Why smiles generate leniency Personality and SocialPsychology Bulletin 21 207ndash214

Lazarus RS (1991) Emotion and adaptation Oxford UK Oxford University PressParkinson B amp Manstead ASR (1993) Making sense of emotion in stories and social life

Cognition and Emotion 7 295ndash323Plutchik R (1980) Emotion A psychoevolutionar y synthesis New York Harper amp RowRime B Mesquita B Philippot P amp Boca S (1991) Beyond the emotional event Six studies on

the social sharing of emotion Cognition and Emotion 5 435ndash465Scherer KR (1988) Appendix C Questionnaire used in the International Survey on Emotion

Antecedents and Reactions (ISEAR) In KR Scherer (Ed) Facets of emotion Recent researchHillsdale NJ Erlbaum

Sherman JW amp Bessenhoff GR (1999) Stereotypes as source monitoring cues On theinteraction between episodic and semantic memory Psychological Science 10 106ndash110

Stoppard JM amp Gruchy CD (1993) Gender context and expression of positive emotionPersonality and Social Psychology Bulletin 19 143ndash150

Tucker JS amp Riggio RE (1988) The role of social skills in encoding posed and spontaneousfacial expressions Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 12 87ndash97

Wallbott HG amp Scherer KR (1994) Cultural determinants in experiencing shame and guilt InJune Price Tangney amp Kurt W Fischer (Eds) Self conscious emotions The psychology of shameand guilt embarrasment and pride (pp 465ndash487) New York Guilford Press

642 HESS ET AL