Sage. Toward a Reconsideration of the Gender-Emotion Relationship

Declarations about how women and men differ emotionally abound in the psychological literature. They can be found in the Parsonian norma-tive construction of family roles, with women described as the "expres-sive " experts and men as the "instrumental " experts (Parsons & Bales, 1955). They are manifest in measures of gender role identificalion, where emotion items constitute the key components of identification with the feminine and not masculine sex role (Constantinople, 1973). Emotionality also features prominently in the content of gender stereo-types with at least 75 % agreement among subjects (both female and male) that the labels "very emotional " and "very aware of feelings of others " were seen to be more characteristic of females than males (Broverman, Vogel, Broverman, Clarkson, & Rosenkrantz, 1972). A converging result emerges strikingly in Shields's (1987) finding that more than 80 % of males and females mention a female target when asked to name the most emotional person they know. Additionally. social pressure