Self-Rated Confidence in Vocal Emotion RecognitioAbility: The Role of Gender

Purpose: We studied the role of gender in metacognition of voice emotion reognition ability (ERA), reflected by self-rated confidence (SRC). To this end, wguided our study in two approaches: first, by examining the role of gender voice ERA and SRC independently and second, by looking for gender effecon the ERA association with SRC. Method: We asked 100 participants (50 men, 50 women) to interpret a set vocal expressions portrayed by 30 actors (16 men, 14 women) as defined their emotional meaning. Targets were 180 repetitive lexical sentences articu-lated in congruent emotional voices (anger, sadness, surprise, happiness, feaand neutral expressions. Trial by trial, the participants were assigned retrospetive SRC based on their emotional recognition performance. Results: A binomial generalized linear mixed model (GLMM) estimating ERaccuracy revealed a significant gender effect, with women encoders (speakersyielding higher accuracy levels than men. There was no significant effect of tdecoder’s (listener’s) gender. A second GLMM estimating SRC found a significaneffect of encoder and decoder genders, with women outperforming men. Gammcorrelations were significantly greater than zero for women and men decoders. Conclusions: In spite of varying interpretations of gender in each independerating (ERA and SRC), our results suggest that both men and women decodwere accurate in their metacognition regarding voice emotion recognition. Further research is needed to study how individuals of both genders use metaconitive knowledge in their emotional recognition and whether and how sucknowledge contributes to effective social communication.