Relationship Between Gender and Performance on Emotion Perception Tasks in a Latino Population

Basic emotions are universally recognized, although differences across cultures and between genders have been described. We report results in two emotion recognition tasks, in a sample of healthy adults from Chile.

192 volunteers (mean 31.58 years, s.d. 8.36; 106 women) completed the Emotional Recognition Task, in which they were asked to identify a briefly displayed emotion, and the Emotional Intensity Morphing Task, in which they viewed faces with increasing or decreasing emotional intensity and indicated when they either detected or no longer detected the emotion.

All emotions were recognized at above chance levels. The only sex differences present showed men performed better at identifying anger (p = .0485), and responded more slowly to fear (p = .0057), than women.

These findings are consistent with some, though not all, prior literature on emotion perception. Crucially, we report data on emotional perception in a healthy adult Latino population for the first time, which contributes to emerging literature on cultural differences in affective processing.