Emotion word production tasks grant insight into the development of emotion word organization and accessibility

Abstract

Children are often instructed to “use their words” to communicate their emotions, which requires them to quickly access words that best describe their feelings. Adults vary in their ability to bring both non-emotion and emotion words to mind (two capacities called verbal fluency and emotion fluency). However, no studies have examined how emotion fluency emerges across development, despite the fact that mastering emotion language is an important developmental task. A cross-sectional sample of participants aged 4-25 years (N = 194) generated as many fruit words as possible in 60 seconds (to measure verbal fluency) and as many emotion words as possible in 60 seconds (to measure emotion fluency). Emotion fluency was highly correlated with verbal fluency and both showed similar increases across age, plateauing in late adolescence. Participants produced more negative emotion words than positive or neutral words, and these proportions were invariant across age. Finally, age of acquisition, valence, dominance, concreteness, and word length were significantly associated with the order in which emotion words came to participants’ minds, suggesting that these dimensions structure the accessibility of emotion concepts. Interestingly, the influence of these dimensions on the order of emotion word production was invariant across age. Results from this study illustrate the developmental emergence of an important, yet understudied, affective skill and provide new insight into the key features that structure which emotion words rapidly come to mind.