Increasing verbal knowledge mediates development of multidimensional emotion representations.

ABSTRACT: How do people represent their own and others' emotional experiences? Contemporary emotion theories and growing evidence suggest that the conceptual representation of emotion plays a central role in how people understand the emotions both they and other people feel.^1-6 Although decades of research indicate that adults typically represent emotion concepts as multidimensional, with valence (positive-negative) and arousal (activating-deactivating) as two primary dimensions,^7-10 little is known about how this bidimensional (or circumplex) representation arises.¹¹ Here we show that emotion representations develop from a monodimensional focus on valence to a bidimensional focus on both valence and arousal from age 6 to age 25. We investigated potential mech

SUBMITTER: Nook EC 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5790154 | biostudies-literature | 2017

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature