The present study aimed to investigate gender differences in the emotional evaluation of 18
film clips divided into six categories: Erotic, Scenery, Neutral, Sadness, Compassion, and
Fear. 41 female and 40 male students rated all clips for valence-pleasantness, arousal,
level of elicited distress, anxiety, jittery feelings, excitation, and embarrassment. Analysis of
positive films revealed higher levels of arousal, pleasantness, and excitation to the Scenery
clips in both genders, but lower pleasantness and greater embarrassment in women compared
to men to Erotic clips. Concerning unpleasant stimuli, unlike men, women reported
more unpleasantness to the Compassion, Sadness, and Fear compared to the Neutral clips
and rated them also as more arousing than did men. They further differentiated the films by
perceiving greater arousal to Fear than to Compassion clips. Women rated the Sadness
and Fear clips with greater Distress and Jittery feelings than men did. Correlation analysis
between arousal and the other emotional scales revealed that, although men looked less
aroused than women to all unpleasant clips, they also showed a larger variance in their
emotional responses as indicated by the high number of correlations and their relatively
greater extent, an outcome pointing to a masked larger sensitivity of part of male sample to
emotional clips. We propose a new perspective in which gender difference in emotional
responses can be better evidenced by means of film clips selected and clustered in more
homogeneous categories, controlled for arousal levels, as well as evaluated through a number
of emotion focused adjectives