Our faces play a crucial role in many online interactions, with so many communities and platforms requiring profile pictures. These pictures can heavily influence how others perceive and respond to us, as research from the University of Essex reveals.

The study found that angry faces are more likely to be viewed as male, while we’re more likely to view faces as female when they’re happy. The authors believe that our understanding of emotional expression in a face is heavily influenced by the perceived sex, and indeed vice versa.

Faulty first impressions

“This study shows how important it is not to rely too much on your first impressions, as they can easily be wrong,” the researchers explain. “Next time you find yourself attributing happiness or sadness to a woman be aware of your bias and possible misinterpretation.

“Interestingly there wasn’t a gender divide in the way the perceived sex of a face affected emotional judgments—but women were slightly more sensitive to subtle changes in emotion overall.”

The researchers created 121 avatar faces and 121 human voices, with each modified in terms of their emotional expression in order to be varying degrees of happy to angry. The sex was also modified on a sliding scale of masculinity to femininity.

A few hundred volunteers were then either showed the faces or played the voice and asked to judge the emotions being displayed as well as whether they were viewing or listening to a male or female.

The results showed that emotion heavily influenced the perceived sex in both the faces and the voices people were exposed to, and this was much more the case than the other way around. The researchers believe this could be due to unconscious activity in the amygdala, which is a key emotional center in our brains. The amygdala allows us to quickly spot and react to possible threats, so would be crucial in identifying an angry attacker. It’s not involved, however, in determining someone’s sex.