Reading Between the Lines: What Books Can Teach Children About Emotion

Contributing Author: Aneyn M. O’Grady

This article was written for the 2021 Corpus Roundtable event hosted by the TalkTogether team.

Can a book help a child navigate the world outside of one? The second day of the Child Directed Corpus Virtual Roundtable (1st July, 2021) focused on the ways children’s books can be a research resource for exploring how children encounter language. What became clear from talks and presentations was the importance of how the type of language found in children’s text differs from child-directed speech. For example, Yaling Hsiao flagged in their Roundtable talk how the syntax and grammar found in children’s books is more complex than what children may hear every day. The Roundtable also discussed what makes language in child fiction unique, with Kate Nation noting during a panel discussion that fiction gives children a special opportunity to talk directly about internal states. Discussions from Day 2 suggested that reading fiction books can be meaningful not just for a child’s language skill, but also their social and emotional development, prompting a research idea also taken up in this blog post: how analyzing fiction texts can shed light on how children understand emotion.





Can Stories Influence the Way We Think About Emotion?

The way emotion words appear in fiction books can help build a vocabulary for internal states at any age. Steven Schwering in their Roundtable talk presented research (described in their 2021 publication [1]) that looked at how often emotion words appear in language written for adults, and how reading fiction may help you to recognize different emotions. They found that how well adults were able to recognize different emotions increased with how much exposure they had had to fiction. The ability to recognize emotions was measured using the Geneva Emotion Recognition Test [2] that presents images and videos of actors portraying various emotional states on a screen next to a list of emotions; you then have to select which emotion is being portrayed. Exposure to fiction was measured using the Author Recognition Test [3] that presents a list of authors (some real, some fake), and you tick off which ones that sound familiar. The thinking is that someone who reads a lot of fiction or is aware of many works of fiction can be singled out by their ability to distinguish the names of real authors from ones that are made up.

Schwering’s research paper [1] uses basic emotion theory (BET) as a theoretical framework to analyze emotion language. BET, as described by Carroll Izard [4], categorizes emotions as either “simple” or “complex” and advances that these emotion categories are ‘universal,’ meaning they are shared by all human beings. Much of the research to support this universalist claim has looked at how people match emotion words to images of facial expressions. How universal these emotion categories are is debatable when taken up cross-culturally as the matches between emotion words and facial expressions are not always the same across different languages [5].





Still, language plays an important role in how we come to understand emotion. Emotion words can help us organize our internal experiences into emotion concepts [6]. At the core of Schwering’s work is an idea found in psycholinguistics: having “easy access” to an emotion word can help you recognize it faster and with greater precision when you see it again later. This “ease of access” is gained through increased exposure to the emotion word; every time you see the word reinforces the link with a specific emotion concept [7]. Schwering’s work suggests that fiction provides consistent exposure to emotion words that can give people an advantage for recognizing emotional states. These findings are from a controlled experiment however, so what does this mean for recognizing emotions in real life?

The benefit of having a rich emotion vocabulary when it comes to emotion understanding is unclear when considering a study by Eric Nook [8] on how children and adults (ages six to 25) represent emotions. Children were more likely to represent and consequently understand emotions as only ranging from being positive to negative. Adults also represented emotions in terms of their valence (positive/negative), but also in terms of their intensity with emotions ranging from high to low. The Nook study [8] found it was overall language skill and not emotion vocabulary that shaped the development of more complex emotion representation. The benefit then of fiction to develop emotion understanding may not just be for the sake of acquiring emotion word vocabulary. It could be something about the structure and experience of reading fiction itself as it engages general language skill, allowing us to think about emotions in a more nuanced manner. Schwering’s work provides one answer, citing fiction as a rich source of complex emotion information because it presents emotion words in context.




Why Fiction is Unique for Emotion Language

Day 2 of the Virtual TalkTogether Roundtable highlighted key differences between language that is spoken to children versus that found in children’s books. Maryellen MacDonald explained in their panel discussion that how often specific words or language structures appear in speech versus text can be linked to the different communication goals of a speaker versus a writer. A fiction writer needs to make use of description-heavy language and achieve the complex task of incorporating the multiple perspectives of characters.

Reading stories presents a rare opportunity to gain access to the internal experience of “other people” through character descriptions whether of their thoughts, personality traits, or behavior. The level of access we have to other people’s minds in real life is limited in comparison, but researchers have still described fiction as a “simulation” of real-life social experience [9, 10] that can engage a reader’s empathy [11]. Representing fictional characters in our mind is understood to co-opt cognitive processes also active during actual social situations, but to a lesser degree. The difference in intensity is tied to the indirect nature of imagining a character compared to the first-hand experience of social interaction that is viscerally stimulating, engaging more senses.

The ability to identify different emotions is understood as the foundation for greater emotion understanding, and there is a growing consensus this ability emerges at age three [12, 13, 14]. The presence of emotion words in children’s books can support emotion recognition by reinforcing mapping between an emotion word and a larger description of the experience. Instances where emotion words appear also provide examples of situations that might trigger specific emotions, echoing Kate Nation’s assertion that each word is a learning opportunity for a child.

The benefit of having context for emotions aligns with the finding from another Nook study [15] that younger children rely more on concrete examples when they define emotions as compared to adults. In their emotion definitions, children mentioned specific situations that can trigger an emotion or physiological markers they associated with the emotion, like noticing you feel hot when angry. This strategy, favored by children, suggests the significance of experience and associations with events for younger children to understand emotional states. The 2020 Nook study [15] also found that knowledge of emotion words plateaued at age 11. This would suggest fiction books read early on in childhood, as compared to later, could make a greater impact on emotion vocabulary development and understanding.

Another distinguishing feature of children’s books is the presence of illustrations. Imagery plays an integral role for narratives to be understood [16] . In children’s books, emotion words are often accompanied by facial expressions or other images that can contribute to a child’s larger representation of a particular emotion word. Simply put, children’s books create mappings between word and image that help build a child’s language of emotion.






Children’s Books Reflect Cultural Norms of Emotion

The author of a children’s book provides information about emotional experience to children by giving specific examples of situations that give rise to emotional reactions, or of how emotions can be expressed. In the instance of illustrated children’s books, these choices are even more culturally coded to convey the physicality of an emotion. Which colors, facial expressions, and postures get linked to a particular emotion all contribute to the way a child may represent an emotion and in turn, how they identify emotional states in others and within themselves. For sadness to be drawn as a down-turned smile with blue backdrop or anger as steam seeping from a character’s ears, eyes bulging in a scene of red, reflects choices on the part of the illustrator and author of what they think is most effective to communicate a given emotion to their target audience.

Illustrations do present an exaggerated form of reality to be sure, but one can imagine how in the case of anger, for example, a child who has been exposed more often to explosive representations may not readily identify a stern tight-lipped expression from a quiet character to represent the same emotional state. In this instance, the context from the written narrative is still needed for the child to decipher which emotion is being experienced depending on their familiarity with certain visual representations of emotion. Which illustrations are then mapped onto emotion words in children’s books can be said to reflect cultural norms of how an emotion is expressed or what is considered an “appropriate” situation that would trigger a particular emotion [17]. This patterning of linking certain internal states to scenarios and their representation in characters can be seen as another form of emotion socialization for children, albeit arguably indirect.

The context of shared book reading also provides a prime opportunity for conversation between a child and an older speaker about an emotional experience described in text. The plot of a story as well as the discussion between a child and a more ‘experienced speaker’ can help establish a cause-and-effect link between situation, resulting emotional experience, and emotion word. This conversational process that integrates the content of narrative with discussion about internal states in a causal way has been found to enhance the way children understand emotions, based on evidence from emotion understanding training studies [18, 19, 20]. This form of research study focuses on promoting skills by having children participate in targeted programs (often developed by researchers), which in the case of emotion understanding training studies presents brief narratives with an increased number of emotion words and includes structured discussion to promote child emotion understanding in a group setting. Children’s books in this instance serve as a springboard for spoken language that further supports children to make sense of internal states described in stories.

The Next Chapter

What then is the true potential of what a book can teach a child? It would appear the extent to which child emotion understanding might be developed through fiction still hinges on the adults involved, whether the authors in their choices of how to represent emotionally charged situations, or the caregivers and teachers who talk to children about emotions in a story when they read together. Recent work by researchers suggests that children’s books can anchor a child’s language to understand emotion both inside and out of a story. Specifically, books can play a key role in language development by exposing children to complex language structures and emotion words they would not necessarily hear in everyday talk.

It is too early to say whether reading fiction can guarantee greater emotion understanding, but researching further how a child’s increased exposure to emotion language through books can help them understand emotions is worth pursuing. Children’s books act as an important resource for development whether because of the type of language they contain, the associations they establish for children between emotion words and illustrations, or as prompts to discuss internal states through shared book reading. As children grow into an increasingly screen-focused world with language taking on new forms to communicate and express emotion, the benefit of narrative to support language and social-emotional development should not be lost. 
 
About the Author 
 
Aneyn O'Grady is a DPhil student at the Department of Education, University of Oxford focused on emotion concept representation and understanding in children.
 
References
 
[1] Schwering, S.C., Ghaffari-Nikou, N. M., Zhao, F., Niedenthal, P. M., & MacDonald, M. C. (2021). Exploring the relationship between fiction reading and emotion recognition. Affective Science, 2, 178-186.

[2] Schlegel, K., & Scherer, K. R. (2016). Introducing a short version of the Geneva Emotion Recognition Test (GERT-S): Psychometric properties and construct validation. Behavior Research Methods, 48(4), 1383–1392. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-015-0646-4

[3] Acheson, D. J., Wells, J. B., & MacDonald, M. C. (2008). New and updated tests of print exposure and reading abilities in college students. Behavior Research Methods, 40(1), 278–289. https://doi.org/10.3758/BRM.40.1.278.

[4] Izard, C. E. (1992). Basic emotions, relations among emotions, and emotion-cognition relations. Psychological Review, 99(3), 561–565.

[5] Jack, R. E., Garrod, O. G. B., Yu, H., Caldara, R. & Schyns, P. G. (2012). Facial expressions of emotion are not culturally universal. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109(19), 7241-7244.

[6] Lindquist, K. A., Satpute, A. B., & Gendron, M. (2015). Does language do more than communicate emotion? Current Directions in Psychological Science, 24(2), 99–108. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721414553440
 
Author's Note: see Lindquist et al. (2015) for a review of evidence from social-cognitive, neuropsychological, cross-cultural, and neuro-imaging studies. 

[7] Doyle, C. M., & Lindquist, K. A. (2017). Language and emotion: hypotheses on the constructed nature of emotion perception. In J.-M. Fernández-Dols & J. A. Russell (Eds.), Oxford series in social cognition and social neuroscience. The science of facial expression (pp. 415–432). Oxford University Press.

[8] Nook, E. C., Sasse, S. F., Lambert, H. K., McLaughlin, K. A., & Somerville, L. H. (2017). Increasing verbal knowledge mediates development of multidimensional emotion representations. Nature Human Behaviour, 1(12), 881–889. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-017-0238-7

[9] Mar, R. A., & Oatley, K. (2008). The function of fiction is the abstraction and simulation of social experience. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 3(3), 173 – 192.
 
[10] Oatley, K. (1999). Why fiction may be twice as true as fact: Fiction as cognitive and emotional simulation. Review of General Psychology, 3(2), 101-117.

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[12] Larsen, J. T., To, Y. M., & Fireman, G. (2007). Children’s understanding and experience of mixed emotions. Psychological Science, 18(2), 186–191. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01870.x
 
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[14] Widen, S. C. (2013). Children’s interpretation of facial expressions: The long path from valence-based to specific discrete categories. Emotion Review, 5(1), 72–77. https://doi.org/10.1177/1754073912451492

[15] Nook, E., Stavish, C., Sasse, S., Lambert, H., Mair, P., Mclaughlin, K., & Somerville, L. (2020). Charting the development of emotion comprehension and abstraction from childhood to adulthood using observer-rated and linguistic measures. Emotion, 20(5), 773-792.
 
Author's Note: Participants were ages four to 25.

[16] Bridge, C. A., Long, S. A., & Winograd, P. N. (1989). The effects of reader and text characteristics on imagery reported during and after reading. Reading Research Quarterly, 24, 353– 372.

[17] Wege, B., Sánchez González, M., Friedlmeier, W., Mihalca, L., Goodrich, E., & Corapci, F. (2014). Emotion displays in media: A comparison between American, Romanian, and Turkish children's storybooks. Frontiers in Psychology, 5, 600.

[18] Grazzani, I., Ornaghi, V., Agliati, A., & Brazzelli, E. (2016). How to foster toddlers' mental‐state talk, emotion understanding, and prosocial behavior: A conversation‐based intervention at nursery school. Infancy, 21(2), 199-227.
 
[19] Pons, F., Giménez-Dasí, M., Daniel, M.-F., Auriac-Slusarczyk, E., Businaro, N., & Viana, K. (2019). Impact of a low-cost classroom dialogue-based intervention on preschool children’s emotion understanding. European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, 27(5), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/1350293X.2019.1651961
 
[20] Tenenbaum, H. R., Alfieri, L., Brooks, P. J., & Dunne, G. (2008). The effects of explanatory conversations on children’s emotion understanding. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 26(2), 249–263. https://doi.org/10.1348/026151007X231057




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