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. An automated linguistic analysis of abstractness supported coders' perceptions of increased abstractness across age. Finally, coders assessed the definitional strategies participants used to describe emotions. Young children tended to describe emotions using concrete strategies such as providing example situations that evoked those emotions or by referring to physiological markers of emotional experiences. Whereas use of these concrete strategies decreased with age, the tendency to use more abstract strategies such as providing general definitions that delineated the causes and characteristics of emotions or by providing synonyms of emotion words increased with age. Overall, this work (a) provides a tool for assessing definitions of emotion terms, (b) demonstrates that emotion concept abstraction increases across age, and (c) suggests that adolescence is a period in which emotion words are comprehended but their level of abstraction continues to mature. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Figure 1.

Age-related pattern of emotion comprehension and one measure of emotion abstraction. Thin plate regression smoothing splines revealed that A) emotion comprehension scores and B) coder abstractness scores followed emergent age-related patterns. However, emotion comprehension scores plateaued significantly earlier than coder abstractness scores. Solid black lines depict spline model fits (dark grey regions represent 95% CIs from spline models). Vertical dashed lines show developmental plateaus computed using first derivatives of spline fits (vertical light grey regions represent 95% CIs from bootstrap simulations).

Figure 2.

Linguistic abstractness scores, a purely linguistic measure of abstractness computed following Seih et al., (2017), increased linearly with increasing age. This result corroborates abstractness scores provided by human coders. Dark grey regions represent 95% CI.

Figure 3.

Age-related patterns of 4 different strategies for describing emotions. A) Use of general definitions followed an emergent pattern that increased across childhood and adolescence before plateauing. B) Use of synonyms increased linearly with increasing age. C) Use of example situations followed a diminishing pattern that decreased across childhood and adolescence before plateauing. D) Use of physiological markers followed a non-linear pattern that was elevated in childhood. Solid black lines depict spline model fits (dark grey regions represent 95% CI from spline models). Vertical dashed lines show developmental plateaus computed using first derivatives of spline fits (vertical light grey regions represent 95% CIs from bootstrap simulations).

Figure 4.

Spline-based estimates of A) emotion comprehension and B) emotion abstraction (i.e., coder abstractness scores) for each emotion across age. Lighter colors represent higher levels of comprehension or abstraction. Emotions are ordered in terms of initial comprehension scores at age 4. In panel B, black regions indicate ages at which no participants fully comprehended the emotion, so estimates of emotion abstractness could not be computed.