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Facial Expression Stereotypes of Male and Female Adults and Children: Do Facial Expression Stereotypes of Adults Apply to Children?

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Abstract

This study explored the facial expression stereotypes of adult men and women within the Chinese cultural context and investigated whether adult participants had facial expression stereotypes of children aged 6 and 10 years old. Three experiments were conducted with 156 adult Chinese university student participants. Experiment 1 explored whether adult participants had facial expression stereotypes of adult men and women. In Experiment 1a, the participants imagined a happy or angry adult face and stated the gender of the imagined face. In Experiment 1b, the participants were asked to quickly judge the gender of happy or angry adult faces, and their response time was recorded. Experiments 2 and 3 explored whether adults apply the stereotypes of adult men and women to 10-year-old and 6-year-old children. Experiment 1 revealed that the participants associated angry facial expressions with men and happy facial expressions with women. Experiment 2 showed that the participants associated angry facial expressions with 10-year-old boys and happy expressions with 10-year-old girls. Finally, Experiment 3 revealed that the participants associated happy facial expressions with 6-year-old girls but did not associate angry facial expressions with 6-year-old boys. These results showed that, within the Chinese cultural context, adults had gender-based facial expression stereotypes of adults and 10-year-old children; however, the adult participants did not have gender-based facial expression stereotypes of 6-year-old male children. This study has important implications for future research, as adults’ perceptions of children is an important aspect in the study of social cognition in children.

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The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Acknowledgments

The authors thank the two anonymous referees for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this article.

Funding

Funding was provided by Natural Science Foundation of Shaanxi Province (Grant No. 2022JM-122), Xi'an Social Science Planning Key Projects (Grant No. 22JY23), Shaanxi Provincial Education Science Planning Project (Grant No. SGH21Y0041) Social Science Foundation of Shaanxi Province (Grant No. 2019Q011).

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  1. School of Psychology, Shaanxi Normal University, No. 199 South Chang’an Road, Xi’an, 710062, People’s Republic of China

    Xiaobin Zhang

  2. School of Psychology, Northwest Normal University, Lanzhou, People’s Republic of China

    Xiaoqing Liu

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Zhang, X., Liu, X. Facial Expression Stereotypes of Male and Female Adults and Children: Do Facial Expression Stereotypes of Adults Apply to Children?. Arch Sex Behav 53, 223–233 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-023-02677-5

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