Charting the development of emotion comprehension and abstraction from childhood to adulthood using observer-rated and linguistic measures.

ABSTRACT: This study examined two facets of emotion development: emotion word comprehension (knowing the meaning of emotion words such as "anger" or "excitement") and emotion concept abstraction (representing emotions in terms of internal psychological states that generalize across situations). Using a novel emotion vocabulary assessment, we captured how a cross-sectional sample of participants aged 4-25 (N = 196) defined 24 emotions. Smoothing spline regression models suggested that emotion comprehension followed an emergent shape: Knowledge of emotion words increased across childhood and plateaued around age 11. Human coders rated the abstractness of participants' responses, and these ratings also followed an emergent shape but plateaued significantly later than comprehension, around age 18

SUBMITTER: Nook EC 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6908774 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature