The value and distinctiveness of awe in science communication: comparing the incidence and content of ‘awesome’ representations in science and non-science picture books

ABSTRACT

The emotions most valued by a culture tend to be depicted more often, and more saliently, in their cultural products than those that are not. The content of such representations will also vary in relation to the particular mandates (e.g. beliefs, values, norms) of those cultural spaces. In the present research, we conducted a study in three sections that compared systematically the representations of awe in sixty picture book biographies of scientists (n = 60) and sixty picture book biographies of non-scientists (n = 60). The first two sections revealed that the frequency and centrality of awe-related content in the images and text of these materials was significantly higher for the former book type. The third section likewise uncovered differences in the representation of the situations where awe is experienced, as well as the characteristics of characters portrayed as experiencing this emotion between and within the two types of picture books. Together, these findings show that awe is an especially valued emotion in the culture of science communication and that the representation of this affective category in this domain is distinct to how it is represented in other spaces.

KEYWORDS:

• Awe
• science communication
• picture books

Acknowledgements

This study was conducted as part of the first author’s PhD thesis research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In this manuscript, we refer to the English emotion category ‘awe’ and the practice of science communication in this language. Following our constructionist view of emotion, we argue that ‘awe’ is not necessarily the same as ‘asombro’ in Spanish, ‘Ehrfucht’ in German, ‘huşu’ in Turkish or any other translated pairing used in another language. While all these other words have come to acquire some of the semantics of awe through things like geographic proximity and trade (see Jackson et al., 2019), we argue that these other words also have their own unique meanings tied to the historical and cultural realities of the places where these languages are spoken.

2 The NCB is awarded by the Association for Library Services to Children (ALSC), which is a subdivision of the ALA. This bulk award has been given every year since 1940 to over 70 books a year, including the winners of the Belpré, Caldecott, and Newbery medals (Association for Library Service to Children, 2020). The list includes books written for children ages K-12 in various formats (e.g. chapter books, graphic novels, picture books) and genres (fiction, non-fiction, expository).

3 The OSTB is given yearly to over 40 books since 1973 by the American National Science Teachers’ Association (NSTA) in association with the Children’s Book Council (National Science Teachers’ Association, 2020). This bulk award highlights the best trade science children’s books in the US market for children grades K to 12, with many becoming bestsellers.

4 As an example, in Brysbaert and New’s (2009) English language word frequency norms, the word ‘awe’ is relatively infrequent, appearing 2.63 times every million words. By contrast, the word ‘fear’ appears 69.08 times, while the word ‘happiness’ appears 24.49 times.

5 We didn’t include the peritext or the covers in this part of the study as some of the images in these sections also appeared main text.

6 For cases in which there were more than five representations, we only included five of these to avoid skewing the sample. This only happened in three illustrations, in which the demographics and actions represented were very similar.

7 Our coding of sociocultural characteristics such as gender and ethnicity were based on our interpretation of things such as the pronouns used to address the character, the context where the characters were represented (e.g. seventeenth century England, Kenya), and the stereotypy of their names. We are aware of the problematic nature of the parameters used in such a way and its limitations (see Koss, 2015), yet we tried to follow some of the best practices of content analysis (e.g. Neuendorf, 2017) and these kind of dimensions are commonly coded in the content analysis of picture books (e.g. Garner & Parker, 2018; Sanders et al., 2018; Vander Wege et al., 2014).

8 Traditional non-parametric tests shows that the difference was statistically significant for raw frequency (W = 1,210; p < 0.001) and proportions (W = 1143; p < 0.001).

9 This is true specially of vocabulary that is not used in daily conversation. ‘Awe’ is not a word parents commonly use when talking to their children. A quick search on ChildFreq (Bååth, 2010) – a tool that searches 5,000 transcriptions of conversations with children ages six months to seven years from the CHILDES database (MacWhinney, 2000) and includes 3,500,000 words – shows no entries for ‘awe’. By contrast, words such as ‘happy’ (n = 1084), ‘sad’ (n = 332), ‘scared’ (n = 405) and other basic emotion categories occur relatively frequently.