Does good always win?: Prevalence of emotional language in children’s literature

Level of Education of Students Involved

Undergraduate

Faculty Sponsor

Abbie Thompson

College

College of Arts & Sciences (CAS)

Discipline(s)

Psychology

Presentation Type

Poster Presentation

Symposium Date

Spring 4-30-2026

Abstract

Children’s literature exposes young readers to diverse perspectives, cultures, and emotional language that shape vocabulary development. Research indicates that emotional language plays a key role in expanding children’s vocabularies (Green & Sun, 2024), and cross-cultural studies show that emotional words appear at similar rates across picture books (Okumura et al., 2024). Because children learn to associate words with emotions early in development, it is important that they encounter both positive and negative emotional language. This study examines the prevalence of positive and negative tone words in children’s literature by analyzing the top 100 picture books checked out in 2023 across six Indiana counties.

To conduct this analysis, we developed a coding manual based on the Montag Database (Montag et al., 2015), which standardizes how text is transcribed. Only text that would be read aloud to a child is included, excluding words embedded in illustrations. To date 438 books, of the 600 in the dataset,  have been transcribed. The Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count program identified the number of words with negative and positive tone.

Preliminary results indicate that positive tone words (M = 3.9, SD = 4.47) appear significantly more frequently than negative tone words (M = 1.39, SD = 1.81), t(437) = 11.1, p < .001, and updated results will be presented at SOURCE following completion of transcription.

Overall, children’s literature shows a strong bias toward positive emotional language, suggesting that exposure to negative emotion vocabulary may need to occur through other contexts.

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