Sex, sexual orientation, and identification of positive and negative facial affect
Abstract
Sex and sexual orientation related differences in processing of happy and sad facial emotions were examined using an experimental facial emotion recognition paradigm with a large sample (N = 240). Analysis of covariance (controlling for age and IQ) revealed that women (irrespective of sexual orientation) had faster reaction times than men for accurate identification of facial emotion and were more accurate in identifying male faces than female ones, whereas men performed the same regardless of the sex of the face. However, there were no overall sex differences in accuracy. These findings suggest a limited role for sex in the perception of facial affect.
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Studies of sex differences in social cognition have mainly focused on emotional expression perception and mental state reasoning with little emphasis placed on imitation.
“Furthermore, studies of sex differences in social cognition have mainly focused on emotional expression perception and mental state reasoning with little emphasis placed on imitation (Krach et al., 2009;Russell, Tchanturia, Rahman, & Schmidt, 2007;Rahman, Wilson, & Abrahams, 2004;Campbell et al., 2002;Thayer & Johnsen, 2000).”
From Functional Specificity and Sex Differences in the Neural Circuits Supporting the Inhibition of Automatic Imitation (2018) · cites this paper as Rahman, Wilson, & Abrahams, 2004
Cites
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“This may itself be linked to sex differences in levels of emotional responding (or expressiveness), women being more expressive than men (Kring & Gordon, 1998).”
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“For example, men generally perform better in visuospatial processing (Rizk-Jackson et al., 2006; Voyer et al., 1995), whereas women tend to outperformmen in verbal fluency (Hyde and Linn, 1988), facial emotion recognition (Rahman et al., 2004), and emotional memory (Canli et al., 2002).”
BackgroundVisual scanning in the recognition of facial affect: is there an observer sex difference?
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“Aside from Palermo and Coltheart (2004) and Rahman et al. (2004), who have assessed response times as well as accuracy across emotional expressions, the literature has for the most part relied on accuracy as the variable by which the sexes are compared in relation to interpreting facial affect.”
InfluentialHormonal contraceptives, menstrual cycle and brain response to faces
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“Conversely, other investigations yield ambiguous findings 14–16 , observe extremely small effect sizes in large samples 8 , or find no gender differences in social abilities 17–19 .”
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Sex differences in emoji use, familiarity, and valence
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“[39] found that healthy women were more accurate at identifying male faces regardless of emotion.”
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“Erwin et al. (1992) found women better at detecting some facial emotions in males, men worse at detecting some emotions in women, and Rahman et al. (2004) found faster reaction times for some male faces than female.”
BackgroundHurst Exponent Analysis of Resting-State fMRI Signal Complexity across the Adult Lifespan
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“We conjecture that gender differences occur in the behavioral and cognitive domains because women generally excel in language (Hyde and Linn, 1988), emotional memories (Canli et al., 2002), and facial emotion recognition (Rahman et al., 2004).”
BackgroundSocial cognition and sex: Are men and women really different?
Tella, M. D., Miti, F., Ardito, R. B., & Adenzato, M. (2020) · Personality and Individual Differences · doi:10.1016/j.paid.2020.110045 · Cited by 74 · see citing works
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“whereas women tend to outperform men in verbal skills and memory [14, 15], facial emotion recognition [16], fine motor skills [4], and emotion processing [4, 17].”
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“In a previous study gender effects were reported on memory for facial identity : women were found to identify more male faces correctly than female faces, irrespective of the emotion expressed (Rahman et al., 2004).”
BackgroundResultSmall-worldness characteristics and its gender relation in specific hemispheric networks
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“…al., 1995;Wang et al., 2012), whereas women tend to outperform men in verbal skills and memory (Kimura, 1996;Hyde & Linn, 1988), facial emotion recognition (Rahman et al., 2004), fine motor skills (Crespo-Facorro et al., 2011) and emotion processing (Crespo-Facorro et al., 2011;Canli et al., 2002).”
BackgroundEye Gaze during Observation of Static Faces in Deaf People
Watanabe, K., Matsuda, T., Nishioka, T., & Namatame, M. (2011) · PLoS ONE · doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0016919 · Cited by 52 · see citing works
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“Furthermore, such differences may be related to performance advantages of females on tasks such as verbal memory and selective attention [39-43], and males on tasks of mental rotation and visuospatial ability [44-46].”
BackgroundIndividual differences in emoji comprehension: Gender, age, and culture
Chen, Y.-H., Yang, X., Howman, H., & Filik, R. (2024) · PLoS ONE · doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0297379 · Cited by 37 · see citing works
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“We expected a main effect of sex given strong evidence of sex-based differences in social cognition, including behavioral evidence of a female advantage on ToM and emotion recognition tasks (e.g., Rahman et al., 2004; Rigon et al., 2016; Russell et al., 2012; Rutherford et al., 2012).”
BackgroundResultDarda, K. M., Butler, E. E., & Ramsey, R. (2018) · Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience · doi:10.1162/jocn_a_01261 · Cited by 30 · see citing works
“…in social cognition have mainly focused on emotional expression perception and mental state reasoning with little emphasis placed on imitation (Krach et al., 2009; Russell, Tchanturia, Rahman, & Schmidt, 2007; Rahman, Wilson, & Abrahams, 2004; Campbell et al., 2002; Thayer & Johnsen, 2000).”
BackgroundGender and emotion recognition with implicit user signals
Bilalpur, M., Kia, S. M., Chawla, M., Chua, T., & Subramanian, R. (2017) · INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON MULTIMODAL INTERACTION · doi:10.1145/3136755.3136790 · Cited by 30 · see citing works
“Some evidence also points to the fact that females are faster at ER than males [15, 41].”
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Xu, Q., Yang, Y., Wang, P., Sun, G., & Zhao, L. (2013) · Brain Topography · doi:10.1007/s10548-013-0275-0 · Cited by 26 · see citing works
“In contrast, several studies demonstrated that gender differences in processing facial expressions were not conspicuous (Grimshaw et al. 2004; Rahman et al. 2004).”
Sexual Orientation and Cognitive Ability: A Multivariate Meta-Analytic Follow-Up
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The Neuroscience of Face Processing and Identification in Eyewitnesses and Offenders
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“…(Phelps et al., 2000; Behrman and Davey, 2001; Golby et al., 2001; Johnson and Frederickson, 2005; Turk et al., 2005), sex (Lewin and Herlitz, 2002; Rahman et al., 2004; Hofmann et al., 2006; Rehnman and Herlitz, 2007; McBain et al., 2009), expressed mood (Kaufmann and Schweinberger, 2004;…”
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“…et al., 1985; Erwin et al., 1992; Forni-Santos & Osorio, 2015; Hampson et al., 2006; Hofmann et al., 2006; Menezes et al., 2017; Öhman et al., 2010; Rahman et al., 2004), while the processing of auditory prosodic signals is less understood (Chun et al., 2012; Ethofer et al., 2007; J. A. Hall,…”
InfluentialIndividual differences in social and non-social cognitive control
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Gender-based functional connectivity differences in brain networks in childhood
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Sex-Related Differences in Emotion Recognition in Multi-concussed Athletes
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Exploring the sex and gender correlates of cognitive sex differences.
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Mu-Suppression as an Indicator of Empathic Processes in Lesbian, Gay, and Heterosexual Adults
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“However, examining emotion recognition performance, Rahman, Wilson, and Abrahams (2004) did not find any effects of sexual orientation, neither in men nor in women.”
BackgroundSex differences in the decoding of pain‐related body postures
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Sex differences in face processing are mediated by handedness and sexual orientation
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“To date, one study has examined the impact of sexual orientation on emotional expression processing of faces and found no significant differences as a function of sexual orientation, and only a moderate effect of sex (Rahman, Wilson, & Abrahams, 2004b ).”
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Sex Differences in Automatic Emotion Regulation in Adolescents with ASD
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“Previous research on sex differences in emotion perception in neurotypical participants noted that across the lifespan, females might be slightly faster and more accurate in facial expression recognition than males (Hall et al., 2010; Rahman et al., 2004), although the effect sizes for such sex differences were often…”
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Differentiating recognition for anger and fear facial expressions via inhibition of return.
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“Rahman et al. ( 2004 ) conducted a study on the evaluation of happiness and sadness on 240 subjects (120 males), but the results showed that there was no accurate gender advantage in these two emotional conditions.”
Sex differences in emotional perception: Evidence from population of Tuvans (Southern Siberia)
Mezentseva, A., Rostovtseva, V., Ananyeva, K., Demidov, A., & Butovskaya, M. (2022) · Frontiers in Psychology · doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2022.924486 · Cited by 6 · see citing works
“Some of them demonstrated that women perceive emotions more accurately in male models, whereas the model’s sex did not affect recognition of emotions in men (Rahman et al., 2004).”
BackgroundGender differences in performance for young adults in cognitive tasks under emotional conflict.
Wang, K.-L., Wu, W., Zhong, H., & Cheng, J. (2017) · Neuroscience Letters · doi:10.1016/j.neulet.2017.09.061 · Cited by 6 · see citing works
Sex differences in perception of invisible facial expressions
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“For example, even studies that failed to find sex differences in recognition accuracy demonstrated faster identification of facial expressions in women than in men (Rahman et al., 2004; Vassallo et al., 2009).”
BackgroundResultWeiss, E. M., Kohler, C., Brensinger, C. M., Bilker, W. B., Loughead, J., Delazer, M., & Nolan, K. (2007) · European psychiatry (Ed Española) · doi:10.1017/s1134066500004550 · Cited by 6 · see citing works
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“, 2012), whereas females perform better in verbal skills and memory (Kimura, 1996), facial emotion recognition (Rahman et al., 2004), and emotion processing (Canli et al.”
BackgroundEmotional Experience and Recognition across Menstrual Cycle and in Premenstrual Disorder
Ramos-Loyo, J., & Sanz-Martin, A. (2017) · International Journal of Psychological Studies · doi:10.5539/ijps.v9n4p33 · Cited by 5 · see citing works
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Relationship Between Gender and Performance on Emotion Perception Tasks in a Latino Population
Cavieres, Á., Maldonado, R., Bland, A., & Elliott, R. (2021) · International Journal of Psychological Research · doi:10.21500/20112084.5032 · Cited by 4 · see citing works
“…have been found to have a significantly lower response latency than men recognizing facial expressions (Wingenbach et al., 2018) However, the literature is not consistent, with some studies failing to observe these gender differences (Andric et al., 2016; Dores et al., 2020; Rahman et al., 2004).”
ResultHorovitz, O., Lindenfeld, I., Melamed, M., & Shechner, T. (2018) · British Journal of Developmental Psychology · doi:10.1111/bjdp.12230 · Cited by 4 · see citing works
Hyposmia and Disgust: Gender-Specific Effects
Ille, R., Wolf, A., Tomazic, P., & Schienle, A. (2017) · Chemical Sensors · doi:10.1093/chemse/bjw111 · Cited by 4 · see citing works
“For example, women were more efficient in recognizing affective facial expressions, especially for faces of the same gender (Levin and Herlitz 2002; Cellerino et al. 2004; Rahman et al. 2004; McBain et al. 2009).”
BackgroundAlcázar-Montenegro, H., Aguirre-Benítez, B. E., Alcázar-Leyva, S., Alvarado-Vásquez, N., & Benítez-Rodríguez, M.-D.-L.-Á. (2020) · Definitions · doi:10.32388/92xzv7 · Cited by 3
Asymmetric interference between facial expression recognition and identity recognition
Komatsu, S., & Hakoda, Y. (2009) · doi:10.5265/jcogpsy.6.143 · Cited by 3
Importance of Visual Support Through Lipreading in the Identification of Words in Spanish Language
Gómez-Vicente, V., Esquiva, G., Lancho, C., Benzerdjeb, K., Jeréz, A. A., & Ausó, E. (2024) · Language and Speech · doi:10.1177/00238309241270741 · Cited by 2 · see citing works
“In addition, women are more attentive gazers and are better than men at recognizing facial expressions (Rahman et al., 2004), so visually based communicative support seems more developed in them.”
Impaired face symmetry detection under alcohol, but no ‘beer goggles’ effect
Harvey, A. J., White, C., Madelin, K., & Morrison, E. R. (2023) · Journal of Psychopharmacology · doi:10.1177/02698811231215592 · Cited by 2 · see citing works
“…observations of females recognising facial emotion expressions faster and more accurately than males (e.g. Hampson et al., 2006; Lee et al., 2013; Rahman et al., 2004; Vassallo et al., 2009; Wells et al., 2016; Wingenbach et al., 2018) and females also showing superior memory recognition for…”
BackgroundGender Identification Based on Human Structural MRI with a Multi-layers-vote Algorithm
Zhao, L., Wei, X., Wu, X.-J., Shen, H., & Hu, D. (2016) · International Conference on Cognitive Systems and Signal Processing · doi:10.1007/978-981-10-5230-9_48 · Cited by 2
El abordaje teórico y clínico de la orientación sexual en Psicología
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Oberweis, T., Gorislavsky, E., Cannon, K. T., Ferguson, A., Jones, A. H., Erwin, J., Hentz, H., & Franklin, R. (2025) · Sexuality & Culture · doi:10.1007/s12119-025-10362-z · Cited by 1 · see citing works
“It is notable that lesbian and straight women are more closely matched in their levels of empathy, because it may help explain why, in at least one study, the overall empathy difference between LGBT people and non-LGBT people disappeared altogether (Rahman et al., 2004).”
Humphries, L. (2016) · doi:10.1504/ijceell.2016.076009 · Cited by 1
Makhlouf, W. B., Choubeni, Z., Nacef, F., & Douki, S. (2010) · Annales Médico-psychologiques revue psychiatrique · doi:10.1016/j.amp.2007.11.019 · Cited by 1 · see citing works
Cross-cultural comparison of university students’ emotional competence in Asia
Min, M. C., Islam, M. N., Wang, L., & Takai, J. (2018) · Current Psychology · doi:10.1007/s12144-018-9918-3 · Cited by 30 · see citing works
Craig, B. M., & Lee, A. J. (2020) · Adaptive Human Behavior and Physiology · doi:10.1007/s40750-020-00141-5
Effects of Emotional Skills Training on Language and Executive Functions in Children
Auguenois, N., Simoës-Perlant, A., Gramaje, C., & Largy, P. (2026) · Applied Cognitive Psychology · doi:10.1002/acp.70244
Huc, M., Nikolic, M., Power, L., McQuaid, R. J., & Jaworska, N. (2026) · Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews · doi:10.1016/j.neubiorev.2026.106610
Gender and Emotion Recognition from Implicit User Behavior SignalsPreprint
Bilalpur, M., Kia, S. M., Kankanhalli, M., & Subramanian, R. (2020) · arXiv (Cornell University) · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2006.13386 · Cited by 1 · see citing works
“Some evidence also points to females achieving faster FER than males [50], [51].”
BackgroundFacial emotion recognition in a sample of psychotic depressives from Anambra state Nigeria
Ucheagwu, V. A., Udoh, F., Ugokwe-Ossai, R. N., Ezeokana, J. O., & Ossai, J. (2016) · International Journal of Research Studies in Psychology · doi:10.5861/ijrsp.2016.1293
“Thayer and Johnson (2000) study has been supported by other studies including Montagne, Kessels, Frigerio, de Haan, and Perrett (2005), Rahman, Wilson, and Abrahams (2004) that also showed that females were more accurate in identifying male faces than female ones.”
ResultSex Differences in Cognition in Alzheimer's Disease
Irvine, K. (2014) · University of Hertfordshire Research Archive (University of Hertfordshire) · doi:10.18745/th.13879
Modulation of Emotional Faces Processing and Its Implication for Depression and Anxiety
Del-Ben, C., & Graeff, F. (2010) · Sciyo eBooks · doi:10.5772/9880
“The first of these regions is the inferior occipital gyrus that captures the general features of the face perception.”
BackgroundUniversality of facial expressions: An interplay between biology and culture
Barzut, V., & Đorić, V. (2022) · TIMS Acta · doi:10.5937/timsact16-40562 · Cited by 1 · see citing works
Does Gender Affect Recognition of Vocal Emotions?
Keshtiari, N. (2016) · Universitätsbibliothek der FU Berlin Hochschulschriftenstelle u. Dokumentenserver · doi:10.17169/refubium-6640
- Authors
- Rahman, Q., Wilson, G. D., & Abrahams, S.
- Affiliations
- University of East London (GB)
- University of London (GB)
- Corresponding author
- Rahman, Qazi
- Venue
- Brain and Cognition
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 2004-04
- Volume
- 54
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 179-185
- ISSN
- 0278-2626 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2082394089
- Cited by
- 137
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2026: 2 · 2025: 1 · 2024: 6 · 2023: 7 · 2022: 7 · 2021: 11 · 2020: 10 · 2019: 5 · 2018: 9 · 2017: 11 · 2016: 15 · 2015: 8 · 2014: 5 · 2013: 7 · 2012: 6
- FWCI
- 1.51
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Brain and Cognition (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Research Portal (King's College London) (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- Medical Research Council
- Topics
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Face Recognition and Perception
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Social and Intergroup Psychology
- Keywords
- facial emotion recognition, sex differences, sexual orientation, happy and sad faces, face perception
- MeSH terms
- Adolescent, Adult, Affect, Discrimination Learning, Facial Expression, Female, Humans, Male, Pattern Recognition, Visual, Psychomotor Performance, Reaction Time, Sexual Behavior, Sex Factors, Homosexuality, Male, Homosexuality, Female
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