Men and women are from the same planet Gender similarities in perspective-taking abilities

The Mental Lexicon. 2026. P. 1–23.

Imbault C., Slioussar N., Ivanenko A., Vyrenkova A. S., Kuperman V.

The study examines emotional responses to words representing a wide range of psychological valence and focuses on gender-related differences. We aimed to find out whether men and women differ in their emotional responses, and whether they can take the perspective of another gender. We used the slider paradigm (Warriner et al., 2017): participants saw a humanoid manikin, a scale and a word on the screen and were instructed to place the manikin as close to, or as far away from, the word as they believed the person represented by the manikin would prefer to be. A change in the shape of the manikin (we used the bathroom figures of a man and a woman) signaled the perspective that the participant was asked to adopt. To assess the cross-linguistic validity of the findings, we collected data from English and Russian.

We found that women showed a wider range of emotional responses, while men displayed a flatter affect. Participants changed their response strategy in the right direction when estimating words for the opposite gender. The study showed a degree of universality in perspective-taking, demonstrating that both men and women are aware of the emotional preferences of the opposite gender.

Keywords: gender, emotional reactivity, psychological valence, perspective-taking, slider paradigm