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) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

中文翻译：

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使用观察者评分和语言学方法绘制从儿童到成年的情感理解和抽象的发展图。

这项研究考察了情感发展的两个方面：情感词理解（了解诸如“愤怒”或“兴奋”之类的情感词的含义）和情感概念抽象（根据在各种情况下普遍存在的内部心理状态来表示情感）。使用新颖的情感词汇评估，我们捕获了4-25岁（N = 196）的参与者的横截面样本如何定义24种情感。平滑样条回归模型表明，情绪理解呈一种新兴的形式：情感单词的知识在童年时期有所增加，并在11岁左右达到平稳。人类编码者对参与者反应的抽象性进行了评级，这些评级也呈新兴形式，但稳定时间明显晚于理解。 ，大约18岁。对抽象性的自动语言分析支持了编码人员对年龄增长的抽象性的看法。最后，编码人员评估了参与者用来描述情绪的定义策略。年幼的孩子倾向于使用具体的策略来描述情绪，例如提供引起这些情绪的示例情况，或者参考情绪体验的生理标记。尽管这些具体策略的使用随着年龄的增长而减少，但是倾向于使用更抽象的策略，例如提供描述情绪的原因和特征的一般定义，或者通过提供情绪词的同义词而随着年龄的增长而增加。总体而言，这项工作（a）提供了一种用于评估情感术语定义的工具，（b）表明情感概念的抽象性随着年龄的增长而增加，（c）认为青春期是一个理解情感词但抽象程度持续成熟的时期。（PsycINFO数据库记录（c）2019 APA，保留所有权利）。