“Hillary Clinton’s ‘Angry’ Face” by Lisa Feldman Barrett in New York Times (Sept. 23/25?, 2016) is based on questionable study of gender prejudice.

In her Sunday Review “Gray Matter” essay, Professor of Psychology Lisa Feldman Barrett says that “…people perceive emotion differently in men’s and women’s faces. It’s something for Americans to consider as they watch the first debate between Mrs. Clinton and Donald J. Trump on Monday” (1).

The problem, says Professor Barrett, is that people think men deal rationally with situations, but women get emotional. In the journal article on which her essay is based, she notes that one reason given for this prejudice is the morphology of feminine faces:

“People of all ages who have facial qualities that resemble an infant (e.g., round face, smaller chin, larger eyes) are subject to what has been called the baby-face overgeneralization effect whereby they are judged to be psychologically similar to babies. Feminine faces are morphologically similar to baby faces, leading to the possibility that inferences about female emotionality, just like other aspects of the female sex role stereotype, result from this perceptual overgeneralization” (2).

So professor Barrett did a study “…using androgynous faces, created on a computer by melding male and female features. We then produced “male” and “female” versions of each face by adding gender-typical hair. Our test subjects, who were unaware of this ruse, were again more likely to attribute an internal, emotional cause to the poses in the faces with female hair, and more likely to attribute a situational cause to the poses in the faces with male hair” (1).

But if you look at the pictures of the “androgynous faces” used in the study (2), the female, shoulder-length, “gender-typical hair” hides the the sides of the neck, giving a supposedly gender-neutral picture the appearance of having a neck that is half as thick as the androgynous picture with the relatively short male hair. And since babies have thinner necks than adults, the study did not show that the prejudice of women’s emotionality is independent of “the baby-face overgeneralization effect.”

Indeed, long hair, per se, may make a person look more emotional than a person with short hair, even if both persons are the same sex. And Professor Barrett doesn’t even mention lipstick, etc., which is designed to suggest youth and emotional arousal.

If anyone wants to delve deeper into the physiognomy of sexual stereotyping, I suggest they include my article on the subject (3). [added 6:26 am]

In any case, I don’t see how the prejudice of female emotionality is relevant to this particular presidential contest. Between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, it is Trump who appears more emotional.

1. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/25/opinion/sunday/hillary-clintons-angry-face.html?ref=opinion

2. http://www.affective-science.org/pubs/2009/shes-emotional-2009.pdf

3. Nakdimen KA. The physiognomic basis of sexual stereotyping. Am J Psychiatry. 1984 Apr;141(4):499-503. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6703126

Note: The New York Times article appears online on September 23, 2016, and in the online version of the September 25th, Sunday Review, but, for some unknown reason, the article does not appear in the print version of the Sunday Review.