Our words, our feelings: Language and emotion development
By Erik Nook, Ph.D. Candidate in Clinical Psychology at Harvard University
We often ask children to “use their words” to tell us how they feel. Although this phrase might seem cliché, it speaks to an important part of human emotions: we use language to express our feelings. Emotion words like “angry,” “disappointed,” “excited,” “lonely,” and “proud” help us identify what we’re feeling and communicate these experiences to other people. But as helpful as these words might appear, emotion scientists have begun to question whether the meaning of these words is the same across different people. In other words, scientists are trying to understand if, how, and why the concepts that underlie emotion words might differ across individuals [1-4].
A potential lens through which to address this question is development. How does the meaning of our emotional language change as we get older? Even though we ask children to “use their words” to express how they feel, what do we know about what these words mean to children? Insight into emotions in children and adolescents could help us understand the developmental processes that support psychological and emotional health across the lifespan.
Two recent studies from our team shed light on how language and emotion interact across development. In one study, we investigated how people’s representation of emotion concepts might vary across age, and in the second study, we investigated how ages differ in their use of emotion words to label how they feel. The first study [5] built on lots of prior research showing that adults tend to represent emotions along multiple dimensions [6,7]. Two key dimensions are valence (how positive or negative emotions are) and what emotion scientists call arousal (how activating or deactivating emotions are). For example, people tend to think about calmness and excitement as both positive emotions, but excitement is much more arousing (i.e., activating or energizing) than calmness. We wanted to know if these representations vary across age.
In a sample of children, adolescents, and adults aged 6-25, we measured how people thought about emotion words using a task where they rated how similar they thought ten emotion words were to each other [6,8]. We then used a statistical technique to extract each participant’s emotion representation, and we found a very interesting pattern: children tended to focus more on the valence dimension of emotions compared to other ages, but with age this “valence focus” shifted to increased attention to the arousal dimension. In other words, children tend to focus primarily on whether emotions are “positive or negative” and as we get older, people represent emotions along dimensions beyond valence. As an example, we found that young children primarily think of excitement and calmness as “both positive” feelings, but older people represented them as both positive but also highly different in their level of arousal.
In the same study, we investigated what psychological mechanisms might underlie this emotion development. What might help children and teenagers learn that even two “positive” emotions can differ from each other? There is evidence that language helps people learn abstract concepts [9-11]. When people can use words to label new categories, they learn these categories faster than when they don’t have words. Could the same be true for emotions? Indeed, analyzing our data, we found that participants’ vocabulary test scores statistically explained age-related differences in emotion representations. As children and teenagers expanded their verbal knowledge, their emotion concepts became more multidimensional - emotional development seems to scaffold on verbal development!
This first study focuses primarily on how language helps people develop multidimensional emotion concepts. While intriguing, it’s different from the question of how people then use emotion words to make sense of what they’re actually feeling as they transition from childhood to adulthood We conducted a second study to investigate this idea, with particular attention to how age might relate to emotion differentiation - how specifically people can identify what they’re feeling [12]. Having high emotion differentiation means that it’s easy to separate emotions from each other (e.g., telling the difference between disappointed and frustrated). Researchers are very interested in emotion differentiation because several studies have connected high emotion differentiation to psychological well-being [13].
We used a standard task to measure emotion differentiation in an overlapping set of participants included in the first study. This task induces a wide range of negative emotions in people by showing them negative images that are commonly used in psychological studies. We asked participants to tell us how much each image made them feel five different negative emotions (angry, sad, upset, disgusted, and scared), and we again used a statistical technique to measure how strongly people differentiated these emotions across images.
Interestingly, we found a U-shape in emotion differentiation across age: emotion differentiation fell from childhood to adolescence and then rose again into young adulthood. This was somewhat surprising; why would children show such high emotion differentiation? When we looked deeper into the data, we found that children had a greater tendency to report only feeling one emotion at a time (e.g., “this picture makes me feel sad and nothing else”), whereas teenagers and adults were more likely to say they felt mixes of emotions. This singular emotion experience in childhood explained why they had such high emotion differentiation scores, but it was a different kind of differentiation compared to adults, who could specifically identify their feelings even when they experienced several emotions at the same time.
Together, these studies shed light on how language and emotion vary across age. Children tend to anchor their representations of emotions on the dimension of valence (i.e., whether they’re positive or negative), and they learn to understand emotions along other dimensions as they get older. When using these words to talk about how they feel, children also tend to report only feeling one emotion at a time. This shifts in adolescence, when teens feel multiple emotions simultaneously but struggle to specifically separate these emotions from each other. Finally in young adulthood, people can both understand emotions along multiple dimensions and separate their emotions using highly differentiated terms.
These cross-sectional studies hope to answer basic questions about how human emotions change across age. Interestingly, they converge to suggest that language plays an important and interesting role in shaping emotion development. For clinical psychologists, this exciting line of research to more applied questions. For example, could a child or teen’s emotional language give us insight into their risk for mental illness, or could therapists improve their treatment by changing how they use emotion language in therapy? The studies described above lay a foundation for these future directions of investigation.
References
[1] Barrett, L. F. “Solving the emotion paradox: Categorization and the experience of emotion,” Personal. Soc. Psychol. Rev., vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 20–46, Feb. 2006.
[2] Barrett, L. F. “The theory of constructed emotion: An active inference account of interoception and categorization,” Soc. Cogn. Affect. Neurosci., vol. 12, no. 1, pp. 1–23, Oct. 2017.
[3] Lindquist, K. A., Satpute, A. B., and Gendron, M. “Does language do more than communicate emotion?,” Curr. Dir. Psychol. Sci., vol. 24, no. 2, pp. 99–108, Apr. 2015.
[4] Lindquist, K. A., MacCormack, J. K., and Shablack, H. “The role of language in emotion: predictions from psychological constructionism,” Front. Psychol., vol. 6, no. 444, Apr. 2015.
[5] Nook, E. C., Sasse, S. F., Lambert, H. K., McLaughlin, K. A., and Somerville, L. H. “Increasing verbal knowledge mediates development of multidimensional emotion representations,” Nat. Hum. Behav., vol. 1, no. 12, pp. 881–889, Dec. 2017.
[6] Barrett, L. F. “Feelings or words? Understanding the content in self-report ratings of experienced emotion.,” J. Pers. Soc. Psychol., vol. 87, no. 2, pp. 266–81, Aug. 2004.
[7] Russell, J. A. “A circumplex model of affect,” J. Pers. Soc. Psychol., vol. 39, no. 6, pp. 1161–1178, 1980.
[8] Suvak, M. K., Litz, B. T., Sloan, D. M., Zanarini, M. C., Barrett, L. F., and Hofmann, S. G. “Emotional granularity and borderline personality disorder.,” J. Abnorm. Psychol., vol. 120, no. 2, pp. 414–426, 2011.
[9] Doyle C. M. and Lindquist, K. A. “When a word is worth a thousand pictures: Language shapes perceptual memory for emotion.,” J. Exp. Psychol. Gen., vol. 147, no. 1, pp. 62–73, Jan. 2018.
[10] Lupyan, G. “What do words do? Toward a theory of language-augmented thought,” in Psychology of Learning and Motivation, vol. 57, B. H. Ross, Ed. Waltham, MA: Academic Press, 2012, pp. 255–297.
[11] Fugate, J. M. B., Gouzoules, H., and Barrett, L. F. “Reading chimpanzee faces: Evidence for the role of verbal labels in categorical perception of emotion.,” Emotion, vol. 10, no. 4, pp. 544–54, 2010.
[12] Nook, E. C., Sasse, S. F., Lambert, H. K., McLaughlin, K. A., and Somerville, L. H. “The nonlinear development of emotion differentiation: Granular emotional experience Is low in adolescence,” Psychol. Sci., vol. 29, no. 8, pp. 1346–1357, Jun. 2018.
[13] Kashdan, T. B., Barrett, L. F., and McKnight, P. E. “Unpacking emotion differentiation: Transforming unpleasant experience by perceiving distinctions in negativity,” Curr. Dir. Psychol. Sci., vol. 24, no. 1, pp. 10–16, 2015.
We often ask children to “use their words” to tell us how they feel. Although this phrase might seem cliché, it speaks to an important part of human emotions: we use language to express our feelings. Emotion words like “angry,” “disappointed,” “excited,” “lonely,” and “proud” help us identify what we’re feeling and communicate these experiences to other people. But as helpful as these words might appear, emotion scientists have begun to question whether the meaning of these words is the same across different people. In other words, scientists are trying to understand if, how, and why the concepts that underlie emotion words might differ across individuals [1-4].
A potential lens through which to address this question is development. How does the meaning of our emotional language change as we get older? Even though we ask children to “use their words” to express how they feel, what do we know about what these words mean to children? Insight into emotions in children and adolescents could help us understand the developmental processes that support psychological and emotional health across the lifespan.
Two recent studies from our team shed light on how language and emotion interact across development. In one study, we investigated how people’s representation of emotion concepts might vary across age, and in the second study, we investigated how ages differ in their use of emotion words to label how they feel. The first study [5] built on lots of prior research showing that adults tend to represent emotions along multiple dimensions [6,7]. Two key dimensions are valence (how positive or negative emotions are) and what emotion scientists call arousal (how activating or deactivating emotions are). For example, people tend to think about calmness and excitement as both positive emotions, but excitement is much more arousing (i.e., activating or energizing) than calmness. We wanted to know if these representations vary across age.
In a sample of children, adolescents, and adults aged 6-25, we measured how people thought about emotion words using a task where they rated how similar they thought ten emotion words were to each other [6,8]. We then used a statistical technique to extract each participant’s emotion representation, and we found a very interesting pattern: children tended to focus more on the valence dimension of emotions compared to other ages, but with age this “valence focus” shifted to increased attention to the arousal dimension. In other words, children tend to focus primarily on whether emotions are “positive or negative” and as we get older, people represent emotions along dimensions beyond valence. As an example, we found that young children primarily think of excitement and calmness as “both positive” feelings, but older people represented them as both positive but also highly different in their level of arousal.
In the same study, we investigated what psychological mechanisms might underlie this emotion development. What might help children and teenagers learn that even two “positive” emotions can differ from each other? There is evidence that language helps people learn abstract concepts [9-11]. When people can use words to label new categories, they learn these categories faster than when they don’t have words. Could the same be true for emotions? Indeed, analyzing our data, we found that participants’ vocabulary test scores statistically explained age-related differences in emotion representations. As children and teenagers expanded their verbal knowledge, their emotion concepts became more multidimensional - emotional development seems to scaffold on verbal development!
This first study focuses primarily on how language helps people develop multidimensional emotion concepts. While intriguing, it’s different from the question of how people then use emotion words to make sense of what they’re actually feeling as they transition from childhood to adulthood We conducted a second study to investigate this idea, with particular attention to how age might relate to emotion differentiation - how specifically people can identify what they’re feeling [12]. Having high emotion differentiation means that it’s easy to separate emotions from each other (e.g., telling the difference between disappointed and frustrated). Researchers are very interested in emotion differentiation because several studies have connected high emotion differentiation to psychological well-being [13].
We used a standard task to measure emotion differentiation in an overlapping set of participants included in the first study. This task induces a wide range of negative emotions in people by showing them negative images that are commonly used in psychological studies. We asked participants to tell us how much each image made them feel five different negative emotions (angry, sad, upset, disgusted, and scared), and we again used a statistical technique to measure how strongly people differentiated these emotions across images.
Interestingly, we found a U-shape in emotion differentiation across age: emotion differentiation fell from childhood to adolescence and then rose again into young adulthood. This was somewhat surprising; why would children show such high emotion differentiation? When we looked deeper into the data, we found that children had a greater tendency to report only feeling one emotion at a time (e.g., “this picture makes me feel sad and nothing else”), whereas teenagers and adults were more likely to say they felt mixes of emotions. This singular emotion experience in childhood explained why they had such high emotion differentiation scores, but it was a different kind of differentiation compared to adults, who could specifically identify their feelings even when they experienced several emotions at the same time.
Together, these studies shed light on how language and emotion vary across age. Children tend to anchor their representations of emotions on the dimension of valence (i.e., whether they’re positive or negative), and they learn to understand emotions along other dimensions as they get older. When using these words to talk about how they feel, children also tend to report only feeling one emotion at a time. This shifts in adolescence, when teens feel multiple emotions simultaneously but struggle to specifically separate these emotions from each other. Finally in young adulthood, people can both understand emotions along multiple dimensions and separate their emotions using highly differentiated terms.
These cross-sectional studies hope to answer basic questions about how human emotions change across age. Interestingly, they converge to suggest that language plays an important and interesting role in shaping emotion development. For clinical psychologists, this exciting line of research to more applied questions. For example, could a child or teen’s emotional language give us insight into their risk for mental illness, or could therapists improve their treatment by changing how they use emotion language in therapy? The studies described above lay a foundation for these future directions of investigation.
References
[1] Barrett, L. F. “Solving the emotion paradox: Categorization and the experience of emotion,” Personal. Soc. Psychol. Rev., vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 20–46, Feb. 2006.
[2] Barrett, L. F. “The theory of constructed emotion: An active inference account of interoception and categorization,” Soc. Cogn. Affect. Neurosci., vol. 12, no. 1, pp. 1–23, Oct. 2017.
[3] Lindquist, K. A., Satpute, A. B., and Gendron, M. “Does language do more than communicate emotion?,” Curr. Dir. Psychol. Sci., vol. 24, no. 2, pp. 99–108, Apr. 2015.
[4] Lindquist, K. A., MacCormack, J. K., and Shablack, H. “The role of language in emotion: predictions from psychological constructionism,” Front. Psychol., vol. 6, no. 444, Apr. 2015.
[5] Nook, E. C., Sasse, S. F., Lambert, H. K., McLaughlin, K. A., and Somerville, L. H. “Increasing verbal knowledge mediates development of multidimensional emotion representations,” Nat. Hum. Behav., vol. 1, no. 12, pp. 881–889, Dec. 2017.
[6] Barrett, L. F. “Feelings or words? Understanding the content in self-report ratings of experienced emotion.,” J. Pers. Soc. Psychol., vol. 87, no. 2, pp. 266–81, Aug. 2004.
[7] Russell, J. A. “A circumplex model of affect,” J. Pers. Soc. Psychol., vol. 39, no. 6, pp. 1161–1178, 1980.
[8] Suvak, M. K., Litz, B. T., Sloan, D. M., Zanarini, M. C., Barrett, L. F., and Hofmann, S. G. “Emotional granularity and borderline personality disorder.,” J. Abnorm. Psychol., vol. 120, no. 2, pp. 414–426, 2011.
[9] Doyle C. M. and Lindquist, K. A. “When a word is worth a thousand pictures: Language shapes perceptual memory for emotion.,” J. Exp. Psychol. Gen., vol. 147, no. 1, pp. 62–73, Jan. 2018.
[10] Lupyan, G. “What do words do? Toward a theory of language-augmented thought,” in Psychology of Learning and Motivation, vol. 57, B. H. Ross, Ed. Waltham, MA: Academic Press, 2012, pp. 255–297.
[11] Fugate, J. M. B., Gouzoules, H., and Barrett, L. F. “Reading chimpanzee faces: Evidence for the role of verbal labels in categorical perception of emotion.,” Emotion, vol. 10, no. 4, pp. 544–54, 2010.
[12] Nook, E. C., Sasse, S. F., Lambert, H. K., McLaughlin, K. A., and Somerville, L. H. “The nonlinear development of emotion differentiation: Granular emotional experience Is low in adolescence,” Psychol. Sci., vol. 29, no. 8, pp. 1346–1357, Jun. 2018.
[13] Kashdan, T. B., Barrett, L. F., and McKnight, P. E. “Unpacking emotion differentiation: Transforming unpleasant experience by perceiving distinctions in negativity,” Curr. Dir. Psychol. Sci., vol. 24, no. 1, pp. 10–16, 2015.
