Emotion talk between friends was examined. Women, men, and mixed pairs engaged in an unstructured and self-disclosure conversation. In addition to comparing talk in the two topics, the speech act category, the directness, the experiencer, and the target of the emotion expression were analyzed. As expected, more references to emotion were made during the self-disclosure than during the unstructured conversation. Negative emotions were referenced more often than positive ones and were particularly likely to be referenced using an indirect form. Contrary to self-report studies, no gender differences were found in the frequency of emotions or in the particular types of emotions referenced. Furthermore, gender composition was not related to the linguistic form of emotion expression. The findings (a) suggest that examining the form of emotion talk is a potentially useful strategy for studying how people verbally convey emotions and (b) lend support to contextual models of behavior.

Meta-analyses of 43 published studies comparing adult women's and men's interruptions during conversations were conducted. Combined significance levels and combined effect sizes were analyzed. Across studies, men were significantly more likely than women to use interruptions. This difference, however, was associated with a negligible effect size (d = .15). A more substantial effect size (d = .33) was found when studies looking specifically at intrusive types of interruption were analyzed separately. Other moderator variables were found to be related to gender effects on the use of intrusive interruptions. Most notably, reports of gender differences in intrusive interruptions were more likely and larger in magnitude when either women (versus men) were first authors, participants were observed in naturalistic (versus laboratory) settings, or participants were observed interacting in groups of three or more persons (versus in dyads). These results lend support to a contextual-interactive model of gender that emphasizes the importance of situational moderators on gender-related variations in social behavior.

Two sets of meta-analyses of studies examining gender effects on parents' observed language with their children were conducted. One looked at studies comparing mothers and fathers in amount of talking, supportive speech, negative speech, directive speech, informing speech, and questions and requests. The other looked at studies comparing mothers' interactions with daughters versus with sons in amount of talking, supportive speech, and directive speech. Across studies, mothers tended to talk more (d = .26), use more supportive (d = .23) and negative (d = .13) speech, and use less directive (d = .19) and informing (d = .15) speech than did fathers. Also, mothers tended to talk more (d = .29) and use more supportive speech (d = .22) with daughters than with sons. Medium or large effect sizes occurred in most analyses when particular moderator variables were taken into account. Effect sizes varied, depending on aspects of the interactive setting, the child's age, sampling and measurement, and publication characteristics. The results are interpreted in relation to a contextual-interactive model of gender typing.