GESTURES AND EMOTIONS: MASCULINE AND FEMININE STYLES OF GESTICULATION

This study is based on the Multimodal Russian Corpus and compares gesture behavior of men and women when expressing emotions. For 16 emotions, 377 fragments of women’s 959 of men’s emotional manual and facial gestures were found. The results were analyzed from the perspective of quantitative and qualitative diff erences. Among the main fi ndings were the following: the gesture behavior of men is generally more diverse and men’s gestures are more expressive when it concerns negative emotions. Using the Mann-Whitney test, the statistical signifi cance of gender diff erences was proved for only 3 emotions, namely for fear, discontent and surprise. Similarity betw een men’s and women’s gestures for other emotions can be explained by the reduce of gender diff erences during the last decades, which covers non-verbal behavior too, so mascu-line and feminine ways to display emotions coincide or acquire many common features. These results refute stereotypes of increased female emotionality and male consistency, but support the assumption that men are more diverse and vigorous when showing anger and discontent, while women are more explicit in expressing joy and aff ection.