Increasing verbal knowledge mediates development of multidimensional emotion representations

Erik C. Nook (), Stephanie F. Sasse, Hilary K. Lambert, Katie A. McLaughlin and Leah H. Somerville
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Erik C. Nook: Harvard University
Stephanie F. Sasse: Harvard University
Hilary K. Lambert: University of Washington
Katie A. McLaughlin: University of Washington
Leah H. Somerville: Harvard University

Nature Human Behaviour, 2017, vol. 1, issue 12, 881-889

Abstract: 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 mechanisms underlying this effect and found that increasing verbal knowledge mediated the development of emotion representation over and above three other potential mediators: fluid reasoning, the general ability to represent non-emotional stimuli bidimensionally and task-related behaviours (for example, using extreme ends of rating scales). These results indicate that verbal development aids the expansion of emotion concept representations (and potentially emotional experiences) from a ‘positive or negative’ dichotomy in childhood to a multidimensional organization in adulthood.

Date: 2017
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DOI: 10.1038/s41562-017-0238-7

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