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Facial Expressions such as happiness, sadness, fear, and anger seem to be universally recognized by humans. Fear is thought to be the hardest emotion to identify and happiness, the easiest. Infant research has supported these notions with the finding that happiness is the first emotion that babies recognize while fear is only identifiable in later infanthood. Research with the elderly has given additional support with the finding that fear is the first emotion that begins to be significantly misidentified in older adults while correct recognition of happiness is maintained until much later in life.
Another important and well documented finding is that females are more accurate in the recognition of emotions than males. In studies of gender differences in communicating and identifying emotion via facial and vocal expressions, females were not only shown to be better overall perceivers of emotion but they were also seen to better identifiers of the most complex emotion, fear. Past research raise some very important questions. For example at what age does the female superiority emerge? Is it apparent in adolescents?
In a study at Emory University the finding that females are better perceivers of emotion was replicated using the Diagnostic Analysis of Nonverbal Accuracy (DANVA). The measure consists of an "Adult Faces" and and "Adult Voices" subtests. The "Adult Faces" consists of 24 photographs which display the facial emotions happy, sad, angry, and fearful at high and low intensity levels. The DANVA "Adult Voices" consist of 24 audio recordings repeating the same sentence expressing the previously mentioned emotions and intensities. The DANVA was administered to 24 male and 47 female adolescents ranging from 11 to 17 years of age. It was originally hypothesized that not only would females be better detectors of emotion in both facial and vocal expressions but also males will be more likely to err in the direction of attributing negative emotional valences to ambiguous emotions expressed in faces and voices.
While both these hypotheses were proved valid an even more interesting pattern of results emerged. Males were seen to consistently misidentify dear. They made more mean errors in labeling facial sadness, facial anger as well as vocal happiness as fear. Moreover, fear was overall the most indistinguishable emotion of the four. Both males and females erred in fear identification more than any other emotion with males making significantly more mean errors than women. In essence males fail to see anger when it is present and are more apt to identify it when it is not.
This finding is an extremely intriguing one. Evolutionary theorists have proposed the "primary caretaker hypothesis" to account for the sex difference in emotion recognition ability. Females have dominated the care of offspring in primate species where mortality rates are high. The accurate recognition of infant emotional cues, especially facial ones, is a crucial component of caretaking and offspring survival. Therefore, the sex that does most of the caretaking (i.e. females) has evolved the greater proficiency in this arena.
On this same token the researchers in the Emory University study propose that their may be an evolutionary benefit for females being superior detectors of fear as fear most importantly delineates danger.The ability to perceive danger is one of the most important elements in offspring survival. It allows us to protect ourselves and our young from a variety of environmental hazards. This crucial fact may have lead to the evolutionary enhancing of an attribute that has aided in the survival of the species. It seems that the stereotypically female attributes of "hypersensitivity" and "overemotionality" often glamorized in the media as the wailing soap opera actress or fainting Scarlet O'Hara may have an adaptive function that will lead to the continuation of our species.
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