The Effect one’s Gender and Personality has on their Ability to Identif

Discussion This investigation aimed to explore gender differences and personality differences in the ability to identify the emotion and gender of a face. The expected results were that the response times produced by females for facial emotion and gender identification would be faster than the response times produced my males. It was also expected that participants categorised as extroverts via the Necker cube would produce faster response times when identifying the emotion and gender of a face. Although the results from this experiment were not significant, they did resemble what was expected. Concerning the first hypothesis, overall females obtained faster response times than males when identifying the emotion of a face, which also supports the findings of Hoffman (2010). A possible explanation for why this difference occurred could be due to the different developmental changes in brain functioning that occurs in males and females, thus different neuronal systems may be used when processing f acial aspects (Everhaurt et al, 2001). That is; when an emotional face is viewed different neural structures are activated in males and females, resulting in different mediation of attention to the facial cues (McClure, 2004). The results from the current study therefore suggests that females may utilise systems that are more sensitive and more efficient at picking up cues where stimulus information is limited, than males (Hall & Matsmoto, 2004). Results obtained by males in the emotion identification task emphasises previously found results by Mantagne (2005) that males are less accurate at judging emotion in a face, especially sadness. On the other hand, Rahmen et al (2004) stated that although women were faster at identifying emotion, th... ...nder and/or personality can affect their ability to identify the gender or emotion of a face. The results obtained suggest that females and extroverts are able to identify facial aspects such as gender and emotion quicker than males and introverts. This may be because neurological and environmental factors influence their ability to efficiently access appropriate strategies to extract cues during processing of a face. The study produced findings that are consistent with previous research however to produce more confident conclusions for this investigation further experimentation with more sensitive measures are required. Future studies could explore physiological changes and neural mechanisms that occur during facial identification in order to provide a deeper insight into differences between categorical groups during facial emotion and gender processing.