Nonverbal Communication by Burgoon Judee K Guerrero Laura K. Floyd Kory

Author:Burgoon, Judee K,Guerrero, Laura K.,Floyd, Kory
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-317-34606-7
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Source: Exline (1963), p. 11.

Facial Expression. A prevalent stereotype is that women are more expressive communicators than men. This stereotype is, in general, upheld by research on facial expressions (Kring & Gordon, 1998). Women are more expressive facially than are men (Eakins & Eakins, 1978; LaFrance & Mayo, 1979) and display warmer cues than do men (Weitz, 1976). Compared to men, women appear to be more likely to express positive emotions such as joy (Burgoon & Bacue, 2003; Coats & Feldman, 1996) and affection (Floyd, 2006; Owen, 1987). They are also more likely than men to express sadness and depression (Blier & Blier-Wilson, 1989; Nolen-Hoeksema, 1987). In contrast, some studies have found that men are more likely than women to express anger (Coats & Feldman, 1996), but other studies have failed to find such a difference (Burrowes & Halberstadt, 1987). Women also appear to be better encoders of emotion than are men (Buck, Miller, & Caul, 1974); however, this varies according to the type of emotion being expressed. In a study by Zaidel and Mehrabian (1969), women were more accurate senders of negative emotions and men were more accurate senders of positive emotions. Androgynous men (those who score highly on both masculine and feminine traits) may also be better senders than traditionally masculine men (Weitz, 1976).

One explanation for why encoding ability varies by the type of emotion is that baseline or at-rest facial expressions are different for women and men. That is, women generally have a positive baseline facial expression; therefore, negative emotions are more distinctly displayed by women. Conversely, men generally have a neutral or negative facial expression; thus, their positive facial expressions become more noticeable.

Consistent with this speculation is the general finding that women smile more than men, regardless of the emotion they feel at the moment (Dovidio et al., 1988). In some of these studies, women also encoded more positive head nodding than men. Moreover, communicators expect women to smile more frequently than men, and this expectation is resistant to information to the contrary (Briton & Hall, 1995). This expectation also may be applied to young children. Haviland (1977) showed a group of people pictures of infants and asked them to identify the sex of the infant. Infants with positive facial expressions were more likely to be judged female, whereas those with negative facial expressions were more likely to be judged male. Hecht et al. (1993) also reported that the smiling norm was more apparent in Caucasians and college-age women than among African Americans and high school-age women.

For men, smiling is an emotional expression, whereas for women, it is an interactional phenomenon (LaFrance & Mayo, 1979). Communicators seem to recognize this distinction. Bugental, Love, and Gianetto (1971) found that children attributed greater friendliness to their fathers who smiled than to their mothers who smiled. Another study found that women—who smiled more than men even when alone—increased their rate of smiling when paired with another woman more than did men paired with men. Women were also more likely

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