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Cartoons are used as indicators of the social meanings, especially personality traits and emotional states, typically assigned to men and women. Single-frame cartoons relevant to sex roles were randomly sampled at five-year intervals, beginning in 1952, from Saturday Evening Post, Saturday Review, and Playboy. Statistical trend analysis on 430 cartoon people in 195 cartoons reveals more trait stereotyping for females than for males. Five dominant, general stereotypes were found: the seductive female, the sexually assertive male, the disconsolate man, the incompetent woman, and the angry woman. There has been a decline in the occurrence of the angry woman stereotype and reciprocal sex role conflict in humorus drawings over the past two decades.

The use of graphical humor as an indicator of social and psychological attitudes is reviewed. A novel method for assessing attitudes using cartoons as projective devices is introduced. Analysis of responses from 275 students who were given both discursive, sentence items and graphical humor, projective items, demonstrates the potential of cartoons as stimuli for attitude measurement. The results suggest that graphical humor might be developed successfully in constructing alternative methods for measuring attitudinal ambivalence. Greater attention should be given to the ambivalence dimensions of social attitudes because ambivalence is a common and expected outcome of the inconsistencies and contradictions inherent in social life.