Abstract
Introduction. Numerous studies deal with the prevalence of male character in children books (Tepper & Cassidy, 1999). Books provide children with societal values and emotional display rules. In this study, we examine whether the gender of both the character and the narrator has an impact on children’s abilities to infer a character’s emotion (Blanc, 2010) and to depict this emotion in their drawings (Brechet, 2013). Method. Children aged between 7 and 10 participated in this study (N = 180). We extracted eight stories from children’s storybooks. Two versions were compared: the characters were either exclusively males or exclusively females. For each story, we identified one passage suggesting that a character feels an emotion (sadness or anger). We also manipulated the gender of the narrator (either a male or a female). All children listened to eight stories, four with a male character and four with a female character. Each time the story was interrupted, children had to determine what was the emotion of the protagonist by selecting the appropriate one among five basic emotions (happy, sadness, anger, fear, surprise) (i.e., identification task). Children received a feedback regarding the target emotion before they had to depict it on the character’s face (i.e., drawing task). Results. The gender of both the character and the narrator had an effect on children’s abilities to identify the target emotion, with better performance when the character or the narrator was a male. These effects were not observed with the drawing task. Also, the error analysis showed that confusions confirmed gender stereotypes. Conclusions. This study contributes to a better understanding of the cues children use to infer emotions from a story and provides interesting results regarding the effects of the prevalence of male character in children books.