Gender Differences and Emotional Expressiveness on Facebook: An Analysis of Prosodic Features among Jordanian Facebookers

Abstract

Despite seemingly countless studies addressing emotional expressiveness, most of these studies were focused on western communities, neglecting the Arab community in general, and the Jordanian discourse in particular. The purpose of this paper is to examine how paralinguistic features of emotional expression are used by male and female Jordanian Facebookers. A total of 100 participants, 50 males and 50 females, took part in this study, all of whom were native Jordanians. The current study was conducted by utilizing the “Web for corpus building” approach, as the data has been extracted manually from Facebook status updates, comments on other users’ status updates, photos, wall posts and so on. The findings revealed that women experience and express emotions more often than men in general. More studies with different contextual factors (e.g., age, social status, and ethnicity) and a different sources of data collection (e.g., face-to-face interaction, role plays, and observation) are recommended for future studies.