Emotion and Gender Typicality Cue Sexual Orientation Differently in Women and Men.

ABSTRACT: Heterosexual individuals tend to look and act more typical for their gender compared to gay and lesbian individuals, and people use this information to infer sexual orientation. Consistent with stereotypes associating happy expressions with femininity, previous work found that gay men displayed more happiness than straight men-a difference that perceivers used, independent of gender typicality, to judge sexual orientation. Here, we extended this to judgments of women's sexual orientation. Like the gender-inversion stereotypes applied to men, participants perceived women's faces manipulated to look angry as more likely to be lesbians; however, emotional expressions largely did not distinguish the faces of actual lesbian and straight women. Compared to men's faces, women's faces varied less

SUBMITTER: Bjornsdottir RT 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7497461 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature