Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The purpose of the present study was to examine the effect of the gender of stimuli on the emotional assimilation betweenthe context and the target. Pictures of five cartoon figures bearing facial expressions of anger, happiness, and sadnesswere presented to 42 participants. Four smaller figures served as the context while a central enlarged figure was placedas the target. The participants were told to judge the emotion intensity of the target by giving ratings from 1-10. Besidesthe types of expression was manipulated to create a difference between ambiguous targets and unambiguous ones. Theresults of the present study showed that the gender of the target has an effect on the assimilation of different emotions.While the assimilation effect was found in male targets, especially for moderate anger and extreme happiness, there wasno assimilation effect when participants saw female targets with moderately angry and extremely sad expressions.