I selected the Mythbuster’s video “Are Women Better at Reading Emotions than Men?” The Mythbuster crew conducted their experiment by having their cast show different emotions while their pictures were taken, however, only their eyes were viewable. The question the crew imposed was “Can women read emotions more accurately and faster than men can?” The results showed women scored an overall average of 10.6, while the men scored an overall average of 9.6. Their results represent a difference in between the two groups, but not by a large margin. The crew claims their results are believable because women have a larger language and emotional memory center in their brains than men.
The method of taking photos of just the eyes of the people selected in their experiment, does make it harder to identify the emotion being shown without the observer being able to see the person’s body language. However, this method fails to account for people who do not show emotions through facial expressions. In addition, the crew members made their emotions very dramatic, which doesn’t allow the test to see if women can still pick up on emotions stronger than men if the eyes of the person in the images were not them attempting to show their emotions so strongly. An improvement to this method could be to do various images of the emotions like images of the entire person or their whole face only to show body language and the expression of their mouths which can also reveal emotions. The photos could be taken in a more natural setting instead of right in front of a camera because this could make it harder to identify the emotion, which would make the test harder to see if their is a stronger difference in the test scores between the men and women after that alteration to the experiment.
Another factor to consider was time. The Mythbuster’s crew said that women scored faster than the men, however they did not officially time them people taking the test, they only scored. An improvement to this method could be to time how long it takes the person observing the pictures to answer what emotion they believe the picture shows, and then take that data into accountability as well when comparing the men vs. the women.
Lastly, the pictures of the emotions sometimes were confusing to the test takers to determine what emotion the person in the image could have been attempting to reveal. For example, the “confused” emotion picture was sometimes misinterpreted for being the emotion “sexy”. An improvement to this method could be to give the people taking the test a sheet with the listed emotion options for them to choose from. This could make it easier and more accurate to track how the men and women answer what emotion they felt the picture represented.
Jess Principe's Blog 
Hey Jess!
We agreed on a lot of the same weaknesses of this study.
I found that a major weakness was that it was not a double blind experiment, and the participants were in the same room as the researchers, and were even interacting with them during the experiment. This can lead to demand characteristics on behalf of the participants, and generally it is more likely to affect the results.
I also noted that the buster’s representations of the emotions may not be the best way to demonstrate the emotions. Participants were often confused, and the dramatization of the emotions hinders external validity.
Great observations, Jess!
Emily
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