How Do Culture and Gender Affect Expressing Emotions?

All of us have emotions. However, there have been conducted studies that show that Gender and Culture play a big role in expressing the emotions. For example, in some cultures they consider smiling as a sign of weakness so the people from these cultures do not smile that often because they have learned that they should eliminate smiling to be considered to be strong characters. There are also some differences between males' and females' form of expressing the emotions.

Gender Differences

Men are able to control their
emotions

The modern psychological researches show that males and females possess different skills of sending and receiving the emotions. Generally, women are more emotionally expressive (Miller, 1976), whereas men are able to conceal or control their displaying of emotions (Buck, Miller,& Caul, 1972). Moreover, women tend to express emotions through facial expression and interpersonal communication, whereas men generally express emotions through actions such as engaging aggressive, dangerous, or distracting behavior.

Women are very emotionally
expressive 

There has been also some studies that were investigating smiling of men and women. Over 90% of the studies showed more females than males smiling, and over 50% found this difference to be statistically significant. It was also found that the smiling difference was greatly reduced in less social situations for females. Furthermore, research has uncovered fairly reliable sex differences in the experience and expression of sadness. Substantial evidence shows that women are more likely to be sad and engage in more interpersonal communication about their problems.
Cultural Differences

One of the biggest differences between cultures in expressing emotions are the cultural display rules. These rules say what emotions expressions are appropriate and which are not. Every culture has slightly different rules than the other cultures. One useful distinction in these rules is made between cultures which are considered generally 'collectivist' such as the Japanese and cultures considered 'individualist' such as Americans. Collectivist cultures tend to cherish 'fitting in' and homogeneity and getting along with others, while individualist cultures tend to emphasize the importance of individual autonomy and power.

 Studies have found that those from collectivist cultures are more likely to mask negative emotions with smiles - but only do this when in the presence of others, not when they are alone which means that they are just showing off to 'fit in'. There are also big differences in controlling emotions among different cultures. There have been conducted a study where they found that it is Russians who most tightly control the display of their emotions, closely followed by the Japanese and South Koreans. On the other side, Americans displayed the least control over their facial expressions (Matsumoto, 2006).