“Social Class, Sex, and the Ability to Recognize Emotions: The Main Effect Is in the Interaction”, Susan A. Brener, Willem E. Frankenhuis, Ethan S. Young, Bruce J. Ellis2023-04-04 (psychology)⁠:

Previous research has demonstrated an inverse relation between subjective social class (SSC) and performance on emotion recognition tasks.

Study 1 (n = 418) involved a preregistered replication of this effect using the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Task and the Cambridge Mindreading Face-Voice Battery. The inverse relation replicated; however, exploratory analyses revealed a statistically-significant interaction between sex and SSC in predicting emotion recognition, indicating that the effect was driven by males.

In Study 2 (n = 745), we preregistered and tested the interaction on a separate archival dataset. The interaction replicated; the association between SSC and emotion recognition again occurred only in males.

Exploratory analyses (Study 3; n = 381) examined the generalizability of the interaction to incidental face memory. Our results underscore the need to reevaluate previous research establishing the main effects of social class and sex on emotion recognition abilities, as these effects apparently moderate each other.

…Main Effect of Sex on Emotion Recognition Consistent across Study 1 & Study 2, two different statistically-significant sex differences emerged: (1) females did better than males on emotion recognition tasks, and (2) male performance was more variable than female performance on these tasks.

Sex differences in skill levels (females higher) and variation (males higher) also emerged for incidental face memory (Study 3; see Supplementary Materials).

Although female advantage on emotion recognition tasks has been extensively studied and discussed in past research (Hall1984; Kirkland et al 2013_11ya; McClure2000; Thompson & Voyer2014), greater male variability is a relatively novel finding. To our knowledge, only one other study has reported findings related to male versus female variability in emotion recognition abilities specifically (Wright et al 2018). As per the current results, Wright et al 2018 also found greater male than female variability. Importantly, greater male variability in emotion recognition abilities is unlikely to be a spurious or artifactual result; it replicated across all analyses in all studies, and there is a larger empirical literature demonstrating higher male than female variability in other domains of cognitive functioning, such as intelligence (Deary et al 2003_21ya; Gray et al 2019; Hedges & Nowell1995; Johnson et al 2008_16ya) and creativity (eg. He & Wong2011; Ju et al 2015; Karwowski et al 2016), as well as in many aspects of brain structure across the lifespan (Wierenga et al 2022). [cf. greater male variance hypothesis]

[Keywords: social class, emotion recognition, social cognition, sex differences]