Representations of Emotions and Feelings in Children's Picture Books for Fostering Social-Emotional Learning. A Visual Analysis.

Social-emotional learning (SEL) is increasingly recognized as an important component of early childhood development. Picture books, through their bimodal integration of narrative and visual storytelling, offer meaningful opportunities for young children to encounter, interpret, and reflect on emotions and social experiences. This thesis investigates how contemporary picture books visually represent emotions and feelings and evaluates their potential to support SEL competencies, giving deeper attention to self-awareness and social awareness. Through quantitative visual analysis of recurring visual patterns across a selected corpus of children's picture books, the study identifies key representational strategies that facilitate children’s emotional understanding and improve their SEL competencies. The results derived from the visual analysis of emotional representations, processes, and circumstances in the corpus of ten picture books suggest that the corpus predominantly represents basic emotions and feelings (i.e., happiness, sadness and anger). These emotions are made visually recognizable through participants and their attributes, such as colours, facial expressions, and body language, as well as through narrative and symbolic processes, and locative settings that function as background elements on the pages of picture books. The findings further indicate that visual elements in picture books may enhance SEL competencies including children’s recognition of their own feelings, their awareness of the reasons behind those feelings (i.e. self-awareness), and the development of empathy (i.e. social awareness). The results of this study contribute to a deeper understanding of the educational potential of picture book illustrations. This research aims to raise awareness of picture books as an effective and accessible tool for fostering SEL in early childhood. The findings may be valuable for educators, parents, illustrators, and researchers, as they offer insights into how visual storytelling can support children’s social-emotional learning.