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Dark Faces are more associated with negative emotions than Light Faces
I've had these for a few years and I decided to write to the company. I included the body of my e-mail below. In addition to what's below, I agree with some of the comments that this is not an exhaustive list, so I would buy another set of emotion cards to have along with it.
"First, I must convey how much I appreciate these flashcards! The quality of the cards themselves is excellent, the box they come in is colorful, sturdy, and fits the cards perfectly, and the illustrations are fun, expressive, and there is a lot of diversity in the different emotions on the 40 cards.
The reason I am writing to you is because something bothersome was pointed out to me recently. I am a white clinician and I work with many kids of color (mainly black families). One of my black colleagues noticed that she thought many of the negative emotions were depicted with dark faces/colors.
After being exposed to this hypothesis, I decided to create an excel sheet (which I am happy to send along to you guys!) to look at some basic statistics. I did a kind of "general" categorization of dark/light, positive/negative, and animal/human. I found that there was an even number of dark and light colors used (20 and 20). I focused on the numbers having to do with human depictions (29/40 cards), and found that there are almost even numbers of dark and light colored humans (14 dark and 15 light). However, 9/29 were negative and dark with only 5/29 being positive and dark. 4/29 were light and negative, but a whopping 11/29 were positive and light. Even though I may have categorized a couple of these differently than another person (positive/negative), these numbers are significant.
My partner (who is white) pointed out that it makes sense to associate "darker" colors with "darker" emotions, though I said that the "darker" part could be conveyed by the background color of the cards, rather than the faces themselves. Even though these are done not with actual skin colors for the most part, I still felt that this shading is important because it still conveys an unconscious bias that supports the association between more stereotypically "negative" emotions and skin darkness (though I believe that all emotions have value of course!).
I'm writing to you not out of anger or disappointment or anything. I was mostly surprised that I hadn't noticed it all until my colleague pointed it out to me, and I thought you guys might be surprised too.
I am wondering if you might consider producing a different set of cards, if you have other cards to recommend, or if I should start looking around to see if anyone else has a product that might better fit my needs as a clinician."
Update - the company is possibly looking into redoing some of the cards, which I thought was cool! I will update again once I learn more.
June 2020 · Toys and Games · verified purchase