You never talk about your feelings!!" she said in exasperation. and you never stop talking about yours!!" he shot back, frowning. Is this scene familiar?

One of our culture's most pervasive gender stereotypes is that women express their emotions more frequently and intensely than men do. In contrast, men supposedly are calmer and possess greater emotional control. Women, its thought, cry easily. Real men don't cry at all.

Studies have shown that both men and women view women as the more emotional sex. Women also place a higher value on emotional expressiveness than do men. Women display more emotional awareness than men do. Women are more accurate than men in deciphering the emotional meaning of nonverbal cues, such as facial expressions. And, they tend to be more sensitive and responsive to the emotional ex-changes in a relationship, often playing the role of the "emotion specialist." But do such widely held stereotypes reflect actual gender differences in emotional experience?

Consider a study by Ann Kring and Albert Gordon, in which participants separately watched film clips that typically evoke happiness, fear, or sadness. For example, a fear-evoking film clip depicted a man almost falling off the ledge of a tall building. During the film, the participants' facial expressions were secretly videotaped from behind a one-way mirror. Galvanic skin response was also monitored as an index of physiolog­ical arousal. Galvanic skin response (GSR) measures the skin's electrical conductivity, which changes in response to sweating and increased blood flow. After the film clip, the participants rated the extent to which they experienced different emotions.

Kring and Gordon found that men and women did not differ in their self-ratings of the emotions they experienced in response to the film clips. However, the women were more emotionally expressive than men. Women displayed more positive facial expressions in response to happy film clips and more negative facial expressions in response to the sad or fearful scenes. In terms of physiological arousal, the sexes did not differ in their reactions to the happy or sad films. But when it came to the frightening film clips, the men reacted much more strongly than the women.

In a similar study, electrodes monitored facial muscle activity of male and female participants as they looked at fear-evoking pictures. Even though men and women rated the pictures as equally unpleasant, the woman’s facial muscles reacted much more strongly to the fearful images,

These and similar findings suggest that men and women are fairly similar in the experience of emotions, but that they do differ in the expression of emo­tions. How can we account for the gender differences in emotional expression?

First, psychologists have consistently found differences in the types of emotions, expressed by men and women. Analyzing cross cultural data from 37 countries around the world, Agneta Fischer and her colleagues found this consistent pattern: Women report experiencing and expressing more sadness, fear, and guilt, while men report experiencing and expressing more anger and hostility.

Fischer and her colleagues argue that the male role encourages the expression of emotions that emphasize power and assertiveness. These powerful emotions—anger, hostility, and contempt—are emotions that confirm the person's autonomy and status. In contrast, the female role encourages the expression of emotions that imply vulnerability, self-blame, vulnerability, and helplessness. These powerless emotions—fear, sadness, shame, and guilt—are emotions that help maintain social harmony with others by minimizing conflict and hostility.

For both men and women, the expression of emotions is strongly influenced by culturally determined display rules, or societal norms of appropriate behavior in different situations. In many cultures, including the United States, women are allowed a wider range of emotional expressiveness and responsiveness than men. For men, it's considered "UN-masculine" to be too open in expressing certain emotions. Crying is especially taboo.

Thus, there are strong cultural and gender-role expectations concerning emotional expressiveness and sensitivity. Like so many stereotypes, the gender stereotypes of emotions are not completely accurate.
As psychologists Michael Robinson and Gerald Clore point out, men and women believe that their emotions differ far more than they actually do. Men and women differ less in their experience of emotion than they do in their expression of those emotions. However, women are the more emotional sex in terms of the ease with which they express their emotions.