Power poses – where do we stand?

<p>Dynamic results for Scenario 2.</p

Anonymously male: Social media avatar icons are implicitly male and resistant to change

When asked to pick a typical human, people are more likely to pick a man than a woman, a phenomenon reflecting androcentrism. Social media websites provide a relevant context in which to study androcentrism since many websites aim to provide users with an ostensibly gender-neutral icon if users do not upload one of their own images. In our first study, 50 male and female online participants (Mage = 35.70) rated whether actual avatar icons from highly trafficked social media websites are perceived as gender-neutral. Using bi-polar scales from woman to man participants reported that overall the icons appeared to be more male-typed than gender-neutral. In Study 2, we investigated whether adding more female-typed icons would discourage or promote androcentric thinking. An online sample of 608 male and female participants (Mage = 33.76) viewed either 12 avatar icons that reflected the over-representation of male-typed icons or 12 that included an equal number of male and female-typed icons. Participants were then asked to produce an example of a typical person. Finally, we measured political ideology on two liberal-conservative scales. We found evidence that exposure to an equal number of male-typed and female-typed avatar icons generated reactance among political conservatives, and thus may have constituted an ideological threat. Conservatives who saw an equal number of male-typed and female-typed icons were twice as likely to come up with a man as a typical person compared to conservatives who saw an over-representation of male-typed avatar icons. Consistent with system-justification theory, these findings show how male-centric thinking is also evident in a seemingly gender-neutral online context

Smiles and Leniency

David Lane of Rice University has created this case study addresses the question: &quot;Will a smiling person accused of a crime be treated more leniently than one who is not smiling? If so, does the type of smile make a difference?&quot; It concerns the following concepts: quantile/boxplots, contrasts among means, Dunnett's test, and Bonferroni correction. Lane addresses the background of the experiment, experimental design, materials, descriptive statistics, inferential statistics, and the interpretation of the data

A large-scale analysis of sex differences in facial expressions

<div><p>There exists a stereotype that women are more expressive than men; however, research has almost exclusively focused on a single facial behavior, smiling. A large-scale study examines whether women are consistently more expressive than men or whether the effects are dependent on the emotion expressed. Studies of gender differences in expressivity have been somewhat restricted to data collected in lab settings or which required labor-intensive manual coding. In the present study, we analyze gender differences in facial behaviors as over 2,000 viewers watch a set of video advertisements in their home environments. The facial responses were recorded using participants’ own webcams. Using a new automated facial coding technology we coded facial activity. We find that women are not universally more expressive across all facial actions. Nor are they more expressive in all positive valence actions and less expressive in all negative valence actions. It appears that generally women express actions more frequently than men, and in particular express more positive valence actions. However, expressiveness is not greater in women for all negative valence actions and is dependent on the discrete emotional state.</p></div

Frequency of facial actions in men and women.

<p>The mean fraction of videos in which inner brow raises, outer brow raises, brow furrows, lip corner pulls and lip corner depressors appeared.</p