Does our gender affect how we read body language?
Men and women use different mental processes to understand body language, with men linking movement and emotion together, while women link body language with reading facial expressions.
Source
Untangling the Ties Between Social Cognition and Body Motion: Gender Impact
What they did
The researchers tested 40 young adults, consisting of 20 men and 20 women, on how they perceive point-light animations of human movement. Participants viewed 2-second clips of actors and judged either their gender or whether they looked angry or neutral. Afterward, participants completed a 36-item computerized test where they identified emotions solely from photographs of human eyes.
What they found
For male participants, accuracy in identifying gender and identifying emotions from body movements was positively correlated. In contrast, female participants showed no correlation between these two body movement tasks, but their accuracy on the body emotion task positively correlated with their performance on the eye-reading test. Overall, women also outperformed men on the eye-reading test with a moderate effect size of 0.56.
The limits
What it doesn't show
This study's reliance on a highly homogeneous student sample of 40 young adults limits how well these findings apply to the general public or other age groups. Because the study only analyzed correlations between performance scores, it cannot establish a causal relationship between these cognitive abilities. Additionally, the body language task only used two states—angry and neutral—meaning it remains unclear if these gender-specific patterns hold true for other complex emotions.
Key terms
- Biological motion
- The visual perception of a moving living being, often studied using simplified patterns of light points on a dark background.
- Point-light displays
- Simplified animations of movement where only a few dots representing major joints are visible against a dark background.
- Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test
- A standardized psychological assessment that measures a person's ability to identify others' emotional states purely from photographs of their eyes.
- Two-alternative forced choice
- An experimental method where participants must choose between exactly two response options for each trial.
Flashcards
Want these cards to stick?
Save the deck to NoteFren and study it with spaced repetition.
Quiz yourself
Why are point-light displays (PLDs) commonly used to study biological motion?
Common questions
Why did the researchers use point-light displays instead of normal videos?
Using point-light displays isolates the dynamic motion cues of the body, removing confounding variables like clothing, body shape, or physical attractiveness that might otherwise influence how participants judge gender or emotion.
Did women perform better than men overall at reading body language?
No, the study found no significant differences in either accuracy or response speed between men and women on the body language tasks; the difference lay in how their performance on these tasks correlated with other social cognitive skills.
What do these results suggest about how men and women process social information?
They suggest that men may rely more heavily on unified biomechanical motion cues to extract both gender and emotion from body language, whereas women may process body language as part of a broader, integrated system for reading social cues like eye expressions.
More on Social cognition