Where the Wild Things Are: understanding of emotions in a picture book

Abstract

Maurice Sendak’s picture book Where the Wild Things Are was investigated as a means of emotion recognition in preschool children. Sixty-six children and 60 adults participated in two tasks. The first was a book task, requiring identification of emotions in three target pictures, in three conditions. The visual condition presented the book with the text covered; the audio condition required listening to an audio recording of the book; in the combined condition participants were presented the book and audio recording simultaneously. The second was a traditional emotion recognition task. Children’s performance in the audio condition was poorer than the in other conditions. Children had difficulty identifying anger and happiness and the positive and negative valence of emotions in the audio condition compared to the other conditions. Our findings suggest that showing the pictures or reading and showing the pictures simultaneously can help children recognise intense emotions.