The Expression of Sadness in Modern Picture Books

Abstract

The picture book is the first medium with which children come into contact and therefore has a complex influence on their esthetic experience as well as on their linguistic, cognitive, motor and emotional development. Picture books offer powerful tools to understand one's own and others' feelings and are therefore an important factor in the acquisition of emotional literacy. This article focuses on the primary and universal emotion of sadness and examines its expression through the interplay of verbal and visual communication. An analysis of selected picture books on the theme of sadness shows that they can be divided into three groups. The first is aimed at children and parents confronted with the loss of a close relative, the second is aimed at children in the pre-reading and early reading stages and deals with the recognition and expression of feelings, and the third presents different nuances of emotional states through wide-open visual readings that allow for numerous interpretations, thus targeting readers of all ages beyond the classic children's literature readership.