Fear is thought to be the hardest emotion to identify and happiness, the easiest. Infant research has supported these notions with the finding that happiness is the first emotion that babies recognize while fear is only identifiable in later infanthood. Research with the elderly has given additional support with the finding that fear is the first emotion that begins to be significantly misidentified in older adults while correct recognition of happiness is maintained until much later in life. Another important and well documented finding is that females are more accurate in the recognition of emotions than males. In studies of gender differences in communicating and identifying emotion via facial and vocal expressions, females were not only shown to be better overall perceivers of emotion but they were also seen to better identifiers of the most complex emotion, fear.
Past research raise some very important questions.
It was originally hypothesized that not only would females be better detectors of emotion in both facial and vocal expressions but also males will be more likely to err in the direction of attributing negative emotional valences to ambiguous emotions expressed in faces and voices. While both these hypotheses were proved valid an even more interesting pattern of results emerged. Males were seen to consistently misidentify dear. They made more mean errors in labeling facial sadness, facial anger as well as vocal happiness as fear. Moreover, fear was overall the most indistinguishable emotion of the four.