Gender effects in decoding nonverbal cues.

This article summarizes results of 7S studies that reported accuracy for males and females at decoding nonverbal communication. The following attributes of the studies were coded: year, sample size, age of judges, sex of stimulus person(s), age of stimulus person(s), and the medium and channel of communication (e.g., photos of facial expressions, filtered speech). These attributes were examined in relation to three outcome indices: direction of effect, effect size (in SD units), and significance level. Results showed that more studies showed female advantage than would occur by chance, the average effect was of moderate magnitude and was significantly larger than zero, and more studies reached a conventional level of significance than would be expected by chance. The gender effect for visual-plus-auditory studies was significantly larger than for visual-only and auditory-only studies. The magnitude of the gender effect did not vary reliably with sample size, age of judges, sex of stimulus person(s), or age of stimulus person(s). The study of people's ability to judge the meanings of nonverbal cues of emotion has a long history in social psychology, dating to the second decade of this century. The first question asked was whether people could recognize nonverbally expressed emotions at all, and this was followed by the search for correlates of judging ability. Gender was one of the first attributes of judges to be examined in relation to judging ability. Gender has not always been an important variable in psychological research. In the study of nonverbal communication, however, gender was considered important from the start, because of the predictions that could be made based on gender role stereotypes and folk beliefs about woman's intuition. Researchers of nonverbal communication have clearly felt that the comparison of males' and females' performances is theoretically