249 The Reading Teacher Vol. 67 Issue 4 pp. 249–254 DOI:10.1002/TRTR.1229 © 2013 International Reading Association R T PICTUREBOOKS AND EMOTIONAL LITERACY Maria Nikolajeva A lthough children’s picturebooks have always been used to support young chil- dren’s reading skills, and although they are slowly being recognized as powerful implements for visual literacy, they have been largely neglected as a path toward children’s emotional development. Recent achievements in cognitive psy- chology have offered scholars of children’s literature, picturebook scholars in particular, new ways of look- ing at picturebook texts, that can inform teachers about using picturebooks to endorse children’s emo- tional literacy. Empathy, that is, the ability to understand other people’s emotions, is arguably the most important capacity that distinguishes human beings from other living organisms. Empathy is also one of the most essential social skills. However, this capacity does not appear automatically; it normally emerges at the age of 4 and develops gradually toward adolescence. Empathy typically develops more slowly or even is totally impeded in children with various forms of autism. Yet like all other literacies, emotional literacy can be enhanced and trained, and here teachers’ role becomes decisive. One potential way of fostering empathy in young children is through picturebooks. Like all fiction, pic- turebooks represent fictional characters’ emotions as well as their interpretation of each other’s emo- tions. However, unlike novels, picturebooks evoke our emotional engagement through images as well as words and, moreover, through amplification of words by images. In wordless or nearly wordless picturebooks, images carry the primary task of emotional engagement. Many picturebooks use wordless dou- ble-spreads to convey strong emotions for which words would be insufficient and inadequate. The best known example is perhaps the three wordless spreads in Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are , after the protagonist’s outcry: “Let the wild rumpus begin,” but this is a recurrent device in picturebooks dealing with extreme emotional states, such as fear and grief. Empathy and Theory of Mind Although representation of emotions in literature is a well-researched area, as is the study of young and adult readers’ affective response to literature, the rapidly expanding area of cognitive literary criti- cism builds on research in cognitive science to inform studies of readers’ cognitive and emotional engage- ment with literary texts (e.g., Hogan, 2011; Stockwell, 2002; Vermeule, 2010; Zunshine, 2006). So far there is little research within cognitive criticism that takes into consideration young readers, who not only lack Maria Nikolajeva is a professor of education at the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom; e-mail mn351@cam.ac.uk. THE INSIDE TRACK