Abstract
Up to now, very few studies investigated the in!uence of genderon the depiction of emotions in children’s drawings. However, theliterature on emotions reveals di"erences between boys and girls invarious kinds of tasks (e.g. recognising emotional facial expressions,understanding an emotional situation, etc.). Therefore, we examinedthe impact of gender on the depiction of sadness and anger. We tookinto account children’s gender but also the gender of the characterexpressing the target emotion. Forty-four boys and forty-seven girlsaged 7–8 and thirty-six boys and #fty-three girls aged 9–10 wereasked to listen to stories where the main character (either a male ora female) was feeling sad or angry and then to draw the facial cuescorresponding to the target emotion. Two methods were used to ratethe drawings: judges assessed the correct vs. incorrect depiction ofthe two target emotions and a content analysis was then conductedon the correct drawings so as to reveal the type of facial cues used bychildren. By showing the major in!uence of children’s gender on theirdepiction of sadness and anger, our #ndings o"er promising lines ofresearch in educational and clinical settings.