Emotion knowledge in pre-adolescent, and adolescents.

To study developmental trends in knowledge of emotion concepts, the present study analyzed adolescent's and pre-adolescents' knowledge of words that name emotions, and tested whether emotion categories are conceptually organized around prototypes (e.g., Rosch, 1975) at a young age. Subjects, aged 10 to 19, were asked to perform a spontaneous production task, i.e., free listing of emotion terms. The obtained data were analyzed both at the qualitative and quantitative level, using a method developed by Zammuner & Galli (2001,) with regard to: i) specificity of produced terms - emotion terms, vs emotion-related terms that refer to emotion components, e.g., cognitive conditions, physiological reactions, or other aspects of emotional experiences, such as their causes -, ii) distinct emotion types that were produced, iii) nature of cited emotions, e.g., “basic” emotions, “complex” emotions, “social” emotions. A set of correspondence analyses were performed to verify whether the distribution of frequencies among types of production terms varied across age levels and gender.