Who expressed what emotion? Men grab anger, women grab happiness

When anger or happiness flashes on a face in the crowd, do we misperceive that emotion as belonging to someone else? Two studies found that misperception of apparent emotional expressions—“illusory conjunctions”—depended on the gender of the target: male faces tended to “grab” anger from neighboring faces, and female faces tended to grab happiness. Importantly, the evidence did not suggest that this effect was due to the general tendency to misperceive male or female faces as angry or happy, but instead indicated a more subtle interaction of expectations and early visual processes. This suggests a novel aspect of affordance-management in human perception, whereby cues to threat, when they appear, are attributed to those with the greatest capability of doing harm, whereas cues to friendship are attributed to those with the greatest likelihood of providing affiliation opportunities.

► Two studies examine illusory conjunctions of angry and happy expressions.
► Male faces grab anger from neighboring faces, whereas female faces grab happiness.
► This was not due to a general tendency to perceive men as angry and women as happy.
► Findings support an affordance-management perspective on emotion perception.