The purpose of this study is to determine the role that gender plays in preschoolers' perception of emotion. The underlying theory is that a person's gender plays a role in the emotion children attribute to that person.
             The participants included 80 children (40 boys, 40 girls) between the ages of 4;0 and 5;11. The girls' mean age was 58 months (SD = 5.17; range: 49 to 71 months). Mean age of girls did not differ significantly from that of boys, t(1, 78) = 1.81, ns. The sample was ethnically diverse, representing the population of the city in which the study took place, Vancouver, B.C., Canada.
             The materials used were two sets of black and white pictures of a face that was not clearly masculine nor clearly feminine. The pictures were created using Morph, a computer program which creates a sequence in which one face gradually changes into the other. The pictures were selected according to facial expression and coded with the Facial Action Coding System (FACS). In the end there were 6 different computer-generated faces, each having facial expressions coded as having emotions showing neutral, happiness, fear, anger, disgust, and sadness. Of the six, two versions of each were created, one with a boy's hairstyle, and another with a girl's hairstyle. The children were randomly assigned to either the male set of pictures or the female set of pictures. Prior to the labeling tasks, each child's emotion concepts were primed during a conversation with the experimenter about emotions. Four stories describing stereotypical emotion-eliciting events and responses were read to the children. The children were shown a drawing depicting a setting for each story while the story was being read. The experimenter introduced the faces while telling the particular story that was created beforehand. The children were then asked how they thought the person in the pict
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