Kawaii (Cute) Feelings and Gender in Japanese Young Adults: Relations with Communion and Gender-Role Attitudes

“Kawaii (cute) feelings” are positive affective responses with culturally specific meanings in Japanese and have often been linked to femininity. This study examined the relations of kawaii feelings with communion (stereotypically associated with femininity) and gender-role attitudes. An online questionnaire survey was conducted among 330 Japanese university students (124 men and 206 women; M = 19.76 years, SD = 1.81). Kawaii feelings were assessed across four targets: infants, baby animals, characters, and objects. Agency, a personality stereotypically associated with masculinity, was also assessed for comparison with communion. Multivariate analysis of covariance revealed that positive communion, negative communion, gender-role attitudes, and gender were associated with kawaii feeling. Higher levels of both positive and negative communion were associated with stronger kawaii feeling toward infants and objects, more egalitarian gender-role attitudes were associated with stronger kawaii feeling toward characters, and women reported stronger kawaii feeling toward baby animals and objects than men. Agency was not significantly associated with kawaii feeling. These results highlight the importance of considering culturally specific emotions to understand how gender norms are maintained and transformed in contemporary Japanese society.