YouTube Kids: Understanding Gender and Emotion through Modern Media

Abstract

This project examines associations of gender and emotions in videos on YouTube Kids, a virtual environment for socialization during middle childhood. We selected YouTube Kids because of its popularity, newness, and absence in previous research on emotion socialization. The top 20 recommended videos were sampled and coded for gender and emotional content, by two independent teams of coders. This procedure was replicated for a total of 40 videos and 689 characters. By assessing gender and emotion content at both the video and character levels, we found feminine videos and characters depict more positive emotionality than their masculine counterparts. Furthermore, characters presented without any gender-typed information displayed significantly less emotionality than feminine, masculine, and androgynous characters. Emotionality is a gendered aspect of media representations. Nonetheless, evolving forms of media have potential as an avenue towards gender-fair socialization of emotions by proactively presenting and promoting equal representations of people and emotions.