Relationship Between Gender and Performance on Emotion Perception Tasks in a Latino Population

Basic emotions are universally recognized, although differences acrosscultures and between genders have been described. We report resultsin two emotion recognition tasks, in a sample of healthy adults fromChile.Methods:192volunteers (mean31.58years, s.d.8.36;106women) completed the Emotional Recognition Task, in which they wereasked to identify a briefly displayed emotion, and the Emotional IntensityMorphing Task, in which they viewed faces with increasing or decreasingemotional intensity and indicated when they either detected or no longerdetected the emotion. Results: All emotions were recognized at abovechance levels. The only sex differences present showed men performedbetter at identifying anger (p=.0485), and responded more slowly to fear(p=.0057), than women. Discussion: These findings are consistent withsome, though not all, prior literature on emotion perception. Crucially, wereport data on emotional perception in a healthy adult Latino populationfor the first time, which contributes to emerging literature on culturaldifferences in affective processing.