Smiling Reflects Different Emotions in Men and Women
Jodi Roth
Researcher Jacob Vigil, Department of Psychology, University of North has found that when women smile, it is a reflection of their mood and trustworthiness whereas when men smile, it has to do with their confidence and calmness.
Priming The Smile Research (feel free to skip)
In the paper Vigil, outlined two main ways that people express emotion. He calls them ‘capacity cues’ and ‘trustworthiness cues.’ These are related to dominance and submissiveness, respectively:
Capacity cues: Include displaying personal characteristics such as physical stature, material resources, and perceived dominance; basically anything that signifies a person’s ability to physically invest in, or affect the welfare of others.
Trustworthiness cues: Include displays of personal characteristics such as kindness, sympathy, compassion and other prosocial behaviour.
As Vigil says, men and women have different social needs and are also subjected to different social expectations. This boils over to how they express emotion.
One example that Vigil uses is that women typically move away from their family to be with their husband. This allowed men to be near his family and causes the woman to create a new relationship – one that is not related specifically to her.
In this scenario, Vigil says, men tend to have more relationships with less intimacy (capacity cue relationships), while women develop a smaller circle with more intimacy (trustworthiness cue relationships). Therefore, each sex relies more heavily on opposite cue types. This explains the sex differences.
So men use more signals of dominance whereas women use more signals of kindness.
What does that mean for the current study on smiling?
In the past, smiling and affect studies showed significant results when done with predominantly female subjects, while non-significant results were predominantly found when experimenters used mostly male subjects. Rarely were studies carried out with equal representation of both males and females in the same study.
The current study used 70 male and 87 female undergraduate students, thus allowing comparisons of sex differences.
In relation to Vigil’s SRFB model, the experimenters predicted that for women, smiling would be a trustworthiness cue and would result in more positive affect. For men, the experimenters predicted that smiling would be a capacity cue displaying confidence, and therefore would not result in more positive affect, but also wouldn’t result in negative affect either.
– In other words, a smile would mean something when done by women, but when done by men, it wouldn’t. This was to be measured in self reported affect.
Subjects were asked to fill out a battery of questionnaires which evaluated their affect levels that day. This was immediately followed by a photograph of the subject, where the subject was instructed only on where to stand and the photographer was not told the purpose of the study. Six people then used a code to indicate whether each subject was smiling in their photo.
The Study Results
The results showed that 76% of women smiled in comparison to only 41% of men. However, importantly, there was no significant difference between men’s and women’s levels of affect on the test battery.
Therefore, smiling was found to correlate positively with positive affect in women. In other words, if they smiled in their photo, they were also more to rate themselves as having positive affect on the test battery.
Meanwhile, for men, there was no difference. That is, smiling did not predict whether the men had rated themselves as having positive affect, or not.
Discussing the Findings
The final conclusion that can be drawn is that for women, smiling is a predictor of positive affect, but for men, smiling does not predict positive or negative affect.
Vigil’s theory that women use more trustworthiness cues and men use more capacity cues fits with these results. The experimenters state that for women, smiling signals warmth and enthusiasm, which is a cue towards willingness to form an intimate relationship. For men, the experimenters state that smiling signals confidence and calmness.
Thus, overall, men are thought to be focused on building a larger quantity of less intimate relationships, rather than more deeply routed intimate relationships. The reverse is true for women.
A couple different questions come to mind with this study. Do more women smile in their photograph because that is simply what one does in a photograph, and in terms of gender roles, women are more expected to follow that type of social rule? Are women just smiling to be submissive?
Certainly, more research is necessary.
Image Credit: Tetsumo
Jodi Roth is an undergraduate student at the University of Guelph currently studying psychology
Resources
Vazire, S., Naumann, L.P., Rentfrow, P. J., and Gosling, S. D. (2019). Smiling reflects different emotions in men and women. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 32:5, 403–405.
Vigil, J. M. (2019). A socio-relational framework of sex differences in the expression of emotion. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 32, 375–428.