Intersectionality in emotion signaling and recognition: The influence of gender, ethnicity, and social class.

Emotional expressions are a language of social interaction. Guided by recent advances in the study of expression and intersectionality, the present investigation examined how gender, ethnicity, and social class influence the signaling and recognition of 34 states in dynamic full-body expressive behavior. One hundred fifty-five Asian, Latinx, and European Americans expressed 34 emotional states with their full bodies. We then gathered 22,174 individual ratings of these expressions. In keeping with recent studies, people can recognize up to 29 full-body multimodal expressions of emotion. Neither gender nor ethnicity influenced the signaling or recognition of emotion, contrary to hypothesis. Social class, however, did have an influence: in keeping with past studies, lower class individuals proved to be more reliable signalers of emotion, and more reliable judges of full body expressions of emotion. Discussion focused on intersectionality and emotion. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).