Gender

The Gender Focus reunites emotion researchers that have an interest in gender, including but not limited to differences between men and women in emotional expression, experience, and physiology.

In the Gender Focus, we document research findings in the realm of gender and emotion and have done so with the publication of an interdisciplinary book on gender and emotion: Latu, I. M., Schmid Mast, M., & Kaiser, S. (Eds.). (2013). Gender and Emotion: An Interdisciplinary perspective. Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang. Also, we currently conduct a meta-analysis on gender and emotion expression and experience in collaboration with Dr. Judith Hall, Northeastern University, USA, and Dr. Agneta Fischer, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

We organize workshops on gender and emotion. In the past (2007) we have organized a 2-day workshop with international scholars on the topic of gender and emotion and in 2012, a one-week practical workshop on meta-analysis was held by Professor Judith Hall from Northeastern University, USA. The next workshop is on Interpersonal Accuracy and will take place in May 2014. A central topic of this workshop will be the accuracy with which individuals assess others with respect to their emotional experience. The workshop will focus on both theoretical and methodological issues and will have a multidisciplinary scope: social, clinical, and neuroscience.

Importantly, we also conduct empirical research that links gender stereotypes with impression formation, interpersonal consequences, and hiring decisions. For instance, one of our current projects investigates - within a virtual reality environment - whether gender-emotion stereotypes can bias hiring decisions for typical masculine and feminine positions. Which variable is more important for hiring, gender, emotion, or their interaction?

Another project uses a computer tasks to evaluate how gender/emotion ambiguous faces are perceived and judged.

Accomplished work encompasses the study of the mechanisms underlying bias against women in leadership positions. In one study we investigated whether and how implicit stereotypes of women’s competence in the workplace (Latu et al., 2011; Psychology of Women Quarterly) can lead to self-fulfilling prophecies, such that they predict the behavior of women who are the targets of this bias (Latu, Schmid Mast, & Stewart, under review). We also investigated effective ways of empowering women’s leadership behavior through exposures to successful role models (Latu, Schmid Mast, Lammers, & Bombari, 2013; Journal of Experimental Social Psychology).

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