More important, greater variance within gender typicality and emotion facilitates their respective utility for distinguishing sexual orientation from facial appearance. These differences align with gender role expectations requiring the expression of positive emotion by women and prohibiting the expression of femininity by men.
Compared to men’s faces, women’s faces varied less in their emotional expression (appearing invariably positive) but varied more in gender typicality. Like the gender-inversion stereotypes applied to men, participants perceived women’s faces manipulated to look angry as more likely to be lesbians however, emotional expressions largely did not distinguish the faces of actual lesbian and straight women. Here, we extended this to judgments of women’s sexual orientation. Consistent with stereotypes associating happy expressions with femininity, previous work found that gay men displayed more happiness than straight men-a difference that perceivers used, independent of gender typicality, to judge sexual orientation. Heterosexual individuals tend to look and act more typical for their gender compared to gay and lesbian individuals, and people use this information to infer sexual orientation.
