Recognition of Emotional Facial Expressions in Men and Women – Differences between Deaf and Hearing People

Abstract

An analysis of emotional functioning of deaf people with regard to gender is important forunderstanding their activities in different areas of life. Emotional functioning is related to emotional intelligence, which involves emotion perception and recognition, emotional expressiveness,empathy, and the ability to control and regulate one’s emotions. The results of previous studieshave demonstrated that gender is one of the elements determining the ability to recognize emotional expressions. It is important to investigate whether deafness in the context of emotionalfunctioning is more important than gender differences. The present study was conducted on80 individuals (40 deaf people – 18 women and 22 men and 40 hearing people – 23 women and17 men). The Emotional Intelligence Scale – Faces (Matczak, Piekarska, Studniarek, 2005) anda set of photographs used by Paul Ekman in his study of basic emotions were used for data collection. The results obtained in the study revealed that men and women do not differ with regard tofacial emotion recognition but there are differences between the group of hearing and deaf people.