Men's and Women's Hostility Is Perceived Differently

Abstract Popular belief holds that women talk and men act when experiencing a negative emotion. The current study examined whether this belief might influence hostility perceptions even when men and women express hostility in identical ways. Two male and two female actors were trained to express high levels of both verbal and nonverbal hostility during the Type A Structured Interview (SI; Rosenman, 1978). Interviewer and actor gender was crossed, resulting in four videotaped interviews representing all possible interviewer/actor gender combinations. Trained male and female coders, who were blind to the experimental hypotheses, rated the actors as displaying identical levels of hostile verbal and nonverbal expression. One hundred five male and 116 female Caucasian undergraduate participants then rated the four videotaped interviews for hostility expression levels in a counterbalanced order. Main effects were found for actor gender; female actors were rated as significantly more nonverbally hostile and as less verbally hostile than male actors. No main effects were found for either participant or interviewer gender. It may be that when women display nonverbal hostility, and men display verbal hostility, they are perceived as violating social expectancies and rules, and these deviations from gender-specific expectancies result in a perception of increased hostility.