Aggregating Emotional Sequences Amplifies the Perception of Women as More Emotional Than Men

The stereotype that women are more emotional than men is pervasive in Western culture, but little research has directly examined how this stereotype translates into judgments of emotionality. We propose that one way gender stereotypes shape judgments of emotionality is through the aggregation of emotional expressions, in which perceivers preferentially remember stereotype–congruent emotional stimuli and consequently overweight these stimuli when forming judgments. To test this, we conducted five studies (N = 772) during 2021–2025 among men participants. In Study 1, we validated the persistence of genderemotion stereotypes. For Studies 2–5, we selected emotional expression stimuli that elicited no gender difference in ratings of emotionality at the single face level. Men participants saw sequences of male and female faces displaying emotional expressions ranging from neutral-to-angry (Study 2), neutral-to-happy (Study 3), and neutral-to-sad (Study 4) and were asked to indicate whether they considered the person in the sequence to be emotional or not. When men perceivers aggregated these stimuli (which exhibited no gender difference at the single face level), they were more likely to rate sequences of female faces as emotional. Furthermore, using a memory test we show that participants better remembered angry female faces within a sequence compared with angry male faces (Study 5), supporting the idea that aggregation of emotional information enables stereotypes to influence judgments via memory. This study reveals an important mechanism by which stereotypes are translated into emotionality judgments. We used only White stimuli faces and recruited only men participants, limiting generalizability.