The conceptual organization of emotion concepts in pre-adolescents: a 2-task study.

To study pre-adolescents’ knowledge of emotion concepts, and whether emotion categories are conceptually organized around prototypes (e.g., Rosch, 1975), 297 children, aged 10 to 14 – were asked to perform two tasks: a) free listing of emotion terms, and b) situation-emotion matching, i.e., identifying what emotion a character feels in a situation (that was described by a sentence). Freelisting and matching data were carefully analyzed with regard to: i) distinct emotion types that were produced, ii) specificity of produced terms, iii) nature of cited emotions. The results showed that pre-adolescents have a quite extended knowledge of emotion concepts, and a complex conceptualization of the relation between situations and emotion-terms - even when considering typical situations only. The results showed that emotion concepts, and emotional episodes are understood in terms of a conceptual framework characterized by the two dimensions of pleasure (or valence) and activation; a third dimension further differentiated among their situationally-specified emotion concepts.