Gender difference on loudness perception and evaluation

Factors affecting gender differences in loudness perception and evaluation were examined from three perspectives: verbal criteria, brain perception (ratio scale evaluation), and cultural background. When the verbal criteria such as "soft" and "loud" was used for evaluation of perceived loudness, the gender differences were observed for Japanese, Chinese and Malaysian participants. Meanwhile, the gender difference was observed only for Chinese men and women when the ratio scale was used for evaluation of perceived loudness.However, this tendency was only observed for some stimuli, thus the experiment was conducted again with Chinese participants under more detailed evaluation conditions, and no clear gender difference was observed as in the case of Japanese and Malaysian participants. From these result, it was suggested that the gender difference in loudness perception might be caused by the process of more higher-order auditory signal processing that uses verbal expression.