‘It is dark, he is scared’: young children’s recognition of emotions in comics

Abstract

The present study aimed to investigate whether preschoolers can recognise the emotions conveyed in panels of the Asterix comic series. The sample consisted of 40 pre-school children (22 boys and 18 girls), aged 52–72 months. They were presented with 8 panels, which in pairs conveyed the emotions of happiness, sadness, fear and anger. Adult raters (N = 109) have previously evaluated these panels as representatively conveying the emotions under investigation. Participants were asked to label the emotion felt by the heroes of each panel and to justify their responses by telling or pointing to the picture which parts of the image conveyed the emotion. Results revealed preschoolers’ ability to recognise the conveyed emotions, with older participants presenting greater efficiency than younger ones. Moreover, happiness and sadness were recognised earlier than anger and fear. Finally, content analysis of children’s responses revealed that they used for the justification of happiness and sadness mainly the facial expressions of the heroes, while for the justification of anger and fear they relied on the formal properties and the context of the panel respectively.

Keywords:

• Comics
• children
• emotions
• pre-school age, pictures

Disclosure statement

No potential competing interest was reported by the authors.