This study investigated effects of gender, emotion, and family expressiveness on preschool children's reactions to narrative characters' emotion expressions. Forty-five preschool children rank-ordered playmate preferences for male and female story characters who expressed happiness, anger, sadness, fear, and neutrality and indicated how much they liked such characters. The effect of children's family expressive environments on their responses was also assessed. Findings indicated that liking ratings were based solely on the nature of the emotion being expressed, with happy characters being liked the most and angry characters the least. Children did base some of their playmate preference rankings of the characters on gender stereotypes of emotion expression, and family expressiveness played a role in these preferences, with children from low-expressive homes making gender-stereotypic preferences more than children from high-expressive homes. (Contains 44 references.) (Author/EV)