Emotion revealed through body motion: gender impact

Abstract

Body motion is a rich and reliable source of information for daily life social cognition, interaction and non-verbal communication. Yet gender effects in body language reading are largely unknown, and a few previous findings are sparse and controversial. Investigation of gender impact on body language reading is of substantial value for clarification of the nature of neurodevelopmental and psychiatric disorders (such as autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, eating and anxiety disorders) characterized by aberrant social cognition. Many of these disorders are gender-specific: females and males are differently affected in terms of clinical picture, prevalence, and severity. The motivation of the present work was to clarify whether, and, if so, how gender affects body language reading in typically developing adults. We intended to make a step toward a framework for evaluation gender differences in the social brain in psychiatric and neurodevelopmental disorders. In our experiments, body motion was represented by a point-light technique as a set of dots on the joints of an otherwise invisible body. This helps to isolate information revealed by body motion from other visual cues (e.g., color, shape). In the first study (Sokolov et al., 2011), by using a three alternative-forced choice paradigm, participants had to indicate whether a display portrayed happy, neutral or angry knocking at a door. The findings show that gender affects accuracy rather than speed of body language reading. This effect, however, is modulated by emotional content of actions: males surpass in recognition accuracy of happy actions, whereas females tend to excel in recognition of hostile angry knocking movement. In the second study (Krüger et al., 2013), a similar pattern of results was found for subtle emotions expressed by point-light human locomotion: Males surpass females in recognition accuracy and readiness to respond to happy walking portrayed by female actors, whereas females tend to be better in recognition of angry locomotion expressed by male actors. In contrast to widespread beliefs about female superiority in social cognition, this work suggests that gender effects in body language reading are largely modulated by emotional content of actions. Further research should combine methods of social neuroscience to uncover neural circuits underlying gender differences in the social brain.