Playing with emotions: Text analysis of emotional tones in gender-casted Children’s media
通过文本分析超过1000小时媒体转录，发现女孩导向媒体整体情感基调更积极，但差距随时间缩小；男孩导向媒体更多愤怒、权力和风险词汇，女孩导向媒体更多悲伤和归属词汇。
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.