Date of Submission

Spring 2024

Academic Program

Division of Science, Mathematics, and Computing; Psychology

Project Advisor 1

Sarah Dunphy-Lelii

Abstract/Artist's Statement

Angry-male/happy-female bias is the tendency for people to perceive male faces as angry and female faces as happy. Previous research has shown this bias in adults with both stimulus-driven face tasks and stereotype-driven character tasks. The main goal of the current study was twofold. The first part was to further investigate what is underlining this bias in adults, by replicating previous studies. In particular, the study focuses on whether this bias is due to top-down or bottom-up processing. The second part of the goal was to create a method design that would be able to test young children for this bias. There is not much research that tests this bias on children who have not yet had extensive social experience; this testing could help us understand if this bias is inborn or learned from the environment. Two separate studies were conducted, each focused on a distinct population (undergraduates and preschoolers) and each study consisted of two tasks. The first task was a stimulus face task, where participants were shown a face and asked to identify the emotion. The second task was a stereotype character task, where participants were asked to think about someone who is either angry or happy and then asked a series of questions about their character, the target question being the gender of the character. The results of my project partially support the prevalence of angry-male/happy-female bias in both the adult sample and the preschool sample. The bias is prevalent in the stereotype-driven character task, but not in the stimulus-driven face task. My findings support the notion that the bias is not innate and stems from extensive social experience, which is minimal among preschoolers.

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Open Access

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

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