When a 5 isn't a 5: Sex, prototypes, stereotypes and standards of comparison in emotion judgments of self and others.

Much emotion research has focused on differences among emotions and has attempted to identify people's shared understanding of specific emotion states (e.g., Ekman, 1972). Little attention has been directed towards understanding variability in different groups' prototypes of particular emotion terms. Sex-differentiated socialization patterns may lead to different emotion experiences for males and females (Hall, 1987). Men and women may have different emotion prototypes, because prototypes are at least partially based on experience. Emotion stereotypes presuppose that males and females have different emotion experiences. In the United States, people believe that women are more emotional than men are, with the possible exception of anger (e.g., Fabes & Martin, 1991). These stereotypes may be internalized and influence emotion prototypes as well. Study 1 was designed to investigate the existence of gendered prototypes for anger, embarrassment, fear, and sadness. Men had male prototypes for anger and embarrassment and gender-neutral prototypes for fear and sadness; women had female prototypes for fear and sadness and gender-neutral-prototypes for anger embarrassment. This pattern of results was consistent with a socialization-based explanation of emotion prototypes. Emotion judgments are inherently ambiguous because there are no clear, objective standards to assess phenomenological experience. When making such ambiguous assessments, people rely on social comparison (Festinger, 1954). A major purpose of the research reported here was to examine the influence of experience- and stereotype-based expectancies on choice of standards of comparison. Systematic differences in the standards of comparison used for emotion judgements were found. In Study 2 when assessing their own emotion experiences, men and women used standards of comparison consistent with their sex's experience-based emotion prototypes found in Study 1. In Study 3 when assessing someone else's emotion experiences, men and women used standards of comparison consistent with the emotion stereotype for each emotion. Implications of these findings for interpretation of the extant emotion literature and methodology for studying emotions are discussed.PhDPsychologySocial psychologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/130972/2/9825231.pd