The primary challenge in studying children's and adolescents' emotional issues lies in reliably and effectively eliciting their emotional states in research settings, a process that is essential for understanding the development and regulation of emotions across childhood and adolescence. Current research in this field predominantly employs situational induction, facial expression paradigms, and audiovisual stimuli as the main approaches to evoke emotional responses in young participants. While these methods have provided valuable insights, a critical limitation of existing pediatric emotion elicitation techniques is their adult-centric design framework, which often fails to fully account for the developmental origins, contextual factors, and age-specific characteristics of children's and adolescents' emotional experiences. In response to this limitation, the present study advocates for a child-centered research approach that explicitly prioritizes the emotional experiences of youth, aiming to enhance ecological validity by designing stimuli that are closely aligned with the everyday social and environmental contexts in which children and adolescents naturally experience emotions. Furthermore, given the current lack of culturally appropriate and developmentally tailored image databases for socio-emotional elicitation in young populations, this research seeks to construct a child-validated image library capable of safely and effectively eliciting emotional responses. The resulting database is intended to provide a reliable experimental platform that can be used to investigate the mechanisms of emotional processing in youth and to support subsequent interventions and programs aimed at promoting emotional health and socio-emotional development. Two empirical studies were conducted to establish and validate the Chinese Child-Adolescent Affective Picture System (CCAAPS). In Study 1, semi-structured interviews with children and adolescents from Shandong and Anhui provinces in China were analyzed using grounded theory to identify principal sources of emotion in daily life. A total of 20 participants, balanced by gender and aged 6–18 years, provided narratives highlighting a range of emotional triggers. Findings revealed that interpersonal interactions—particularly school-based social contexts—constituted the primary emotional triggers. These qualitative insights were systematically coded to extract keywords that guided the selection of images for the database. Study 2 recruited a total of 491 participants, aged between 6 and 18 years. Each participant was asked to evaluate a set of 311 socio-emotional images that had been preselected based on the findings from Study 1. The images were rated along three distinct emotional dimensions—valence, arousal, and motivational intensity—using a revised 5-point Likert scale. Analysis of the subjective ratings revealed statistically significant differences among positive, neutral, and negative images across all three dimensions (p <.001 for all comparisons), demonstrating that the images were capable of eliciting differential emotional responses in a manner consistent with their intended affective categories. Furthermore, the internal consistency of participants’ ratings was assessed using Cronbach’s alpha, yielding coefficients exceeding 0.85 for each dimension. These results indicate that the image ratings were reliable across participants and that the emotional dimensions measured were internally coherent. The CCAAPS has several implications. First, as a standardized tool grounded in children’s real-life experiences, it provides a link between laboratory paradigms and everyday emotional phenomena, supporting research on emotion recognition, affective processing, emotion-related psychopathology (e.g., depression, anxiety), interpersonal regulation, and antisocial behaviors such as bullying. Second, it can be applied in socio-emotional learning (SEL) to provide culturally appropriate materials for empathy training and emotion regulation interventions in educational contexts. Third, by providing a validated, developmentally appropriate, and culturally adapted affective picture system, the CCAAPS enhances methodological infrastructure for developmental affective science in China. In conclusion, the present research contributes both conceptually and practically to the study of youth emotions by constructing the first child-centered, culturally adapted affective picture system for Chinese children and adolescents. The CCAAPS establishes an ecologically valid resources for investigating socio-emotional experiences, enriches the toolkit for researchers. This work therefore provides an essential infrastructure for future studies seeking to understand, support, and promote the emotional health of Chinese youth.