Little research has focused on children's decoding of emotional meaning in expressive body movement: none has considered which movement cues children use to detect emotional meaning. The current study investigated the general ability to decode happiness, sadness, anger, and fear in dance forms of expressive body movement and the specific ability to detect differences in the intensity of anger and happiness when the relative amount of movement cue specifying each emotion was systematically varied. Four-year-olds (n = 25), 5-year-olds (n = 25), 8-year-olds (n = 29), and adults (n = 24) completed an emotion contrast task and 2 emotion intensity tasks. Decoding ability exceeding chance levels was demonstrated for sadness by 4-year-olds; for sadness, fear, and happiness by 5-year-olds: and for all emotions by 8-year-olds and adults. Children as young as 5 years were shown to rely on emotion-specific movement cues in their decoding of anger and happiness intensity. The theoretical significance of these effects across development is discussed.

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Children's perceptions of the emotional reactions of same-and different-sex characters in stories containing ambiguous and unambiguous emotional contexts were examined. According to the Parallel-Constraint-Satisfaction Theory (Kunda and Thagard. Psychological Review, 103, 284-308, 1996), stereotypes are more likely to be utilized in ambiguous contexts, defined here as those likely to elicit multiple emotional responses. Seventy suburban U.S. preschoolers were read vignettes describing boys or girls in ambiguous or unambiguous emotion-inducing events and reported how the vignette characters were feeling. Results suggest that the perceptions of participants were more likely to reflect gender-emotion stereotypes (e.g. perceiving males as angry and females as sad) in ambiguous contexts than in unambiguous contexts. Results are discussed in terms of children's emerging understanding of genderemotion stereotypes.