ИСТИНА

Adults are experts in the recognition of basic emotional expressions, but females do it more accurately compared to males (McClure, 2000). This may occur because women and men could rely on different mechanisms of face perception, namely females are more successful using feature-based processing and extraction of second-order relations (the distances among face features) so than males. Perception and recognition of facial expression in female and male adults were studied applying eye tracking technology. Upright, inversed and Thatcherized stimuli were used. Three sets of photos of 2 male and 2 female faces from WSEFEP (Olszanowski et al., 2015 doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01516) each displaying seven facial expressions (neutrality, anger, fear, disgust, happiness, surprise and sadness) were randomly presented to each participant. Women were more accurate than men in the expression recognition of Thatcherized images, that evidenced a better feature processing in females compared to males. The results showed some differences in fixation patterns between two participant groups. Women looked more at the eyes and shifted more fixations between internal facial features compared to men, suggesting more feature-based processing and extracting information about second-order relations. Men made more fixations on eyebrows, nose bridge and external facial features than women, suggesting more holistic processing.