Body Language Reading and Gender

Generally speaking and not considering cross-cultural differences, women seem to be more sensitive to non-verbal cues and more proficient in recognising facial emotions than men who tend to be better at recognising emotions from voices. According to Sokolov et al.'s study (n=34) carried out in Germany - and consistent with conclusions of previous studies - angry emotion is recognised better than happy emotion. However, some tendencies could be observed based on the participant's gender:

Males outperformed in recognition of happy knocking (p < 0.015), whereas females excelled in recognition of neutral knocking (p < 0.016) and tended to over-perform in recognition of angry knocking (p < 0.07).

The authors conclude that there is a gender effect which again is modulated by the emotional content.

Here we investigated whether, and, if so, how recognition of emotional expressions revealed by body motion is gender dependent. To this end, females and males were presented with point-light displays portraying knocking at a door performed with different emotional expressions. 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. Advantage of women in recognition accuracy of neutral actions suggests that females are better tuned to the lack of emotional content in body actions.

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- Sokolov, A. A., Krüger, S., Enck, P., Krägeloh-Mann, I. & Pavlova, M. A. (2011). Gender Affects Body Language Reading. Frontiers in Psychology, 2, link
- photograph taken in New York in 1970 by Garry Winogrand (1928-1984) via