Effects of emotion-related stereotype messages on young women’s experience and expression of emotion

Despite prevailing scientific evidence to the contrary, gender stereotypes of emotion maintain that females are more emotional than males. Although inaccurate gender stereotypes of emotions abound, the extent to which young women are influenced by emotion stereotypes is unknown. The current study examines if exposure to stereotype messages about expressing emotions, and the consequences of expressing such emotions, affects young women’s experience and expression of emotions. Using an experimental design, young women were randomly assigned to hear (and read) one of four messages directly or indirectly describing females’ emotional experiences and expressions relative to males’, and the negative or positive consequences of such experiences and expressions. Participants then reported their willingness to express emotions via the 20-item Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (Watson et al. in J Personal Soc Psychol 54(6):1063–1070, 1988. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.54.6.1063) and engaged in an “Emotion-Recollection Task” (Hess et al. in Cognit Emot 14(5):609–642, 2000. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699930050117648; Weinstein and Hodgins in Personal Soc Psychol Bull 35(3):351–364, 2009. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167208328165) where they described, in writing, a recent emotional life event. Results revealed that participants were more comfortable expressing negative emotions, and demonstrated a greater willingness to actually express their emotions, when exposed to direct rather than indirect stereotyped messages. Although the young women did not report feeling more comfortable expressing their emotions following emotion-related stereotypes with positive or negative consequences, they did in fact use more emotion words when a stereotype message reflected positive rather than negative consequences. The study demonstrates how emotion-related stereotypes may affect the lived experience of young women. © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021.