Playing with emotions: Text analysis of emotional tones in gender-casted Children’s media

Abstract

This research examines the differences in emotional tones and drives in gender-casted (e.g. boy-directed vs. girl-directed) children’s media and how this has changed over time. This topic is important given that children spend copious amounts of time watching media. Two studies utilizing Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) text analysis on a diverse body of over 1000 h of media transcripts from 78 franchises demonstrate that girl-directed children’s media has a more positive emotional tone overall than boy-directed media, but that this difference is narrowing over time. Additionally, boy-directed media features a greater prevalence of words expressing the emotion of anger and the drives of power and risk. In contrast, girl-directed media features a greater prevalence of words expressing the emotion of sadness and the drive of affiliation. The results proffer insights into how emotional tones and drives represented in children’s media may impact young consumers’ understanding of gender.