Gender and Emotion in the United States: Do Men and Women Differ in Self‐Reports of Feelings and Expressive Behavior?

U.S. emotion culture contains beliefs that women are more emotional and emotionally expressive than men and that men and women differ in their experience and expression of specific emotions. Using data from the 1996 emotions module of the GSS, the authors investigate whether men and women differ in self‐reports of feelings and expressive behavior, evaluating whether the patterns observed for men and women are consistent with cultural beliefs as well as predictions from two sociological theories about emotion and two sociological theories about gender. Surprisingly, self‐reports do not support cultural beliefs about gender differences in the frequency of everyday subjective feelings in general. Men and women do, however, differ in the frequency of certain positive and negative feelings, which is explained by their difference in social position. The implications of the findings for theory and research on both gender and emotion are discussed.