Do not rush to answer in the affirmative. Most of us are unimportant physiognomists. Moreover, studies show that women, especially sexually attractive ones, are more prone to erroneous conclusions than men.
Have you noticed that some people always look like they are angry or annoyed? Rumor attributes this feature to such stars as Victoria Beckham, Kristin Stewart, Kanye West. But this does not mean that they are actually eternally dissatisfied with the world or those around them. We run the risk of making a mistake when trying to judge a person’s real emotions only on the basis of his facial expression.
Psychologists from Arizona State University conducted a series of experiments to understand how men and women recognize anger from facial expressions and which of them is more prone to mistakes in “decoding” facial expressions.
How we deceive and deceive others
Experiment 1
218 participants had to imagine that they were angry with a stranger or a stranger. How would they non-verbally react to this? There were 4 options to choose from: a joyful facial expression, angry, frightened or neutral. The men answered that in both cases their face would express anger. The same answer was given by the women, imagining the stranger who had angered them. But as for the imaginary stranger, the participants in the experiment answered that they would most likely not show that they were angry with her, that is, they would maintain a neutral expression on their faces.
Experiment 2
88 participants were shown 18 photos of different people, all of these people had a neutral facial expression. However, the subjects were told that in fact, the people in the photo are trying to hide feelings — anger, joy, sadness, sexual arousal, fear, pride. The challenge was to recognize real emotions in the pictures. It turned out that women were more likely than men to assume that the face was expressing anger, and women depicted in the pictures were attributed this emotion more often than men. It is interesting that women almost did not read other emotions from the proposed list.
Experiment 3
56 participants were shown the same photos. It was necessary to distribute them into groups: expressing hidden anger, joy, fear, pride. In addition, participants completed a questionnaire that assessed how sexually attractive and sexually liberated they consider themselves to be. And again, women most often deciphered other people’s emotions as anger.
Those participants who considered themselves sexually attractive and liberated are especially prone to such an interpretation.
What do these results show?
It is more difficult for women than for men to recognize whether other women are angry or not. And above all, sexually attractive women are prone to erroneous judgments. Why is this happening? The clue comes from the results of the first study: when women get angry at each other, they prefer to keep a neutral expression. They seem to intuitively know this and stay alert just in case. That is why it is difficult for them to figure out what the neutral expression on the face of another woman means.
Women are more likely than men to be indirectly aggressive (such as spreading gossip) towards other women, and especially towards sexually attractive women. Therefore, those who have had to be the target of this aggression more than once expect a catch in advance and mistakenly attribute unkind feelings to other women, even when in fact they are treated quite neutrally.