[показать] [GS_DISC:] Men Are Better Than Women at Ferreting Out That Angry Face in a Crowd (NYT)
Date: Wed, 14 Jun 2006 00:46:29 -0400

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/13/health/psychology/13face.html

June 13, 2006
Men Are Better Than Women at Ferreting Out That Angry Face in a Crowd
By NICHOLAS BAKALAR

Trying to get someone's attention? Looking angry may be the key. The
face
most likely to stand out in a crowd is an irate one, according to a new
study, and men are better than women at picking up the anger that a
face
conveys.

On the other hand, women are more adept at detecting more socially
relevant
expressions that communicate happiness, sadness, surprise and disgust.

"The really interesting effect," said Mark A. Williams, the study's
lead
author, "is the difference between males and females."

Dr. Williams, a postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, and his co-author, Jason B. Mattingley, a psychology
professor
at the University of Melbourne in Australia, set out to measure how
efficiently the emotions conveyed by facial expressions are identified
in a
large group by others.

The results appear in the June issue of Current Biology.

In the experiment, they showed arrays of human faces to 78 men and 78
women,
using photographs displaying angry, fearful, happy, sad, surprised,
disgusted or neutral expressions.

First, participants were shown a group of four photographs depicting
three
neutral expressions and one expression that was clearly angry - brow
compressed, eyes narrowed, teeth flashing in a menacing grimace. The
subjects were asked to pick out, as quickly as they could, the angry
face
from all the others.

Then the scientists used the same procedure while showing the subjects
seven
faces that were neutral and one that was unmistakably enraged. In some
examples the photograph depicted an infuriated man, in others an angry
woman.

Next, the experimenters ran the same tests using fearful faces in place
of
the angry ones. Among the four or eight neutral faces was one picture
of a
man or woman, eyebrows raised, eyes wide open with the whites visible,
lips
pursed - obviously a person who was terrified.

Men and women consistently detected the angry faces more quickly than
the
terrified ones. But the ease of detecting angry faces depended on the
sex of
the person in the photograph and the sex of the observer.

The time required to pick out the face of a woman, whether angry or
frightened, increased with the rise in the number of photographs from
four
to eight.

But there was no difference in the speed with which people were able to
find
the angry man, no matter how many faces were in the array.

Detecting the angry man in a sea of faces, the authors say, has a
survival
advantage for both sexes.

"From an evolutionary perspective," they write, "the potential for
physical
threat from a male is greater than that from a female."

So any perceptual system that helps detect an angry man is an
advantage.

In background information in the article, the authors point out that
there
are significant differences between males and females in other
cognitive
skills as well. Women, for example, tend to perform better than men at
fine
motor tasks, while men have are better at finding directions using a
map.
They also suggest that the size difference between men and women may
have
helped shape cognitive processes.

Men and women picked out fearful faces with equal facility, but men
were
significantly faster than women when asked to find the angry face. On
the
other hand, when participants were asked to use the same procedure to
pick
out a happy, sad, surprised or disgusted face, women were faster than
men.

Qazi Rahman, a visiting research fellow at the Institute of Psychiatry
of
King's College London who has written widely about sexuality and human
sex
differences but was not involved in this study, praised the study and
said
that the results were not a surprise.

"This elegant study," he said, "found precisely what we would predict
from
sexual selection theory - an evolutionary theory that predicts specific
differences between male and female organisms - in that anger in the
male
face would be detected rapidly by other males to whom such cues might
have
had very real survival consequences."

The authors conclude that their findings are consistent with the idea
that
detection systems for facial expressions have evolved differently in
men and
women, and that this finely-honed ability probably developed as a
response
to threat and danger.