Gender and Preschoolers’ Perception of Emotion.pdfVIP

Gender and Preschoolers’ Perception of Emotion Sherri C. Widen and James A. Russell Boston College Presented at the Canadian Psychological Association 2002 Annual Convention, Vancouver, BC June 2002 Abstract A person’s gender plays a role in the emotion children attribute to that person, even given unambiguous cues to a basic emotion. Eighty preschoolers (4 or 5 years of age) were asked to name the emotion of either a boy (Judd) or a girl (Suzy) in otherwise identical stories about prototypical emotional events and, separately, as shown with identical prototypical facial expressions. Boys more often labeled Judd than Suzy as disgusted, both in the disgust story and with the disgust face. There was also a trend for girls to label Suzy as afraid more often than Judd, both in the fear story and with the fear face. Introduction In a fascinating and nearly neglected study Condry and Condry (1976) found that adults attributed more anger to a boy than to a girl (shown via videotape) reacting to a Jack-in-the-box. The interesting twist was that the observers were actually shown the same videotape. The “boy” and the “girl” were the same infant simply labeled differently by the experimenter. Differences in the attributed emotion were in the eye of the beholder, not in the displayed facial expression. This fascinating finding concerns adult observers and may be limited to ambiguous cues. There is some evidence that the gender of the expresser affects attributed emotion given unambiguous facial cues (Plant, Hyde, Keltner, Devine, 2000), but this evidence too is limited to adult observers. Further, different people posed the facial expressions, making it impossible