Fuzzy gender categories: How emotional expression influences typicality

Social categories are conceived of as broad classes in which some instances are better exemplars than others, and non-necessary features are assumed to modulate typicality. This research investigated how various emotional expressions impact on gender categorization. Two concurrent measures – response latencies and prototypicality judgments – were collected and compared in three experiments. The results showed that emotional expressions of any kind are highly relevant in modulating females' category membership, while they are of less relevance in making a male more or less prototypical. These findings provide new insights into the relation between gender and emotional expressions.