Emotionality vs. a bad day

Oops! We’ve internalized some cultural gender stereotypes again!

When participants in an experiment looked at photos of women's and men's faces looking sad, afraid, angry, or disgusted, with a sentence beneath the image purporting to explain the emotion ("buried a family pet" for a sad face, for instance, and "was threatened by an attacker" for a fearful one), they offered starkly different explanations for the emotions: that women in the photos felt sad, angry or afraid because they were "emotional," but the pictured men felt those emotions because they were "having a bad day"—even when the expressions and their explanation was identical.

Grrr, dammit. Of course, I’m only having a bad day so nothing about my angry reaction should be used to claim I have some sort of personality defect.