“We found a pretty interesting developmental trajectory when it comes to emotion differentiation,” says psychological scientist Erik Nook of Harvard University, first author on the study. “Children<\/strong> tend to report feeling only one emotion at a time, producing differentiated<\/strong> but sparse emotional experiences. Adolescents<\/strong> begin to co-experience emotions but they are not well differentiated<\/strong>, and adults both co-experience and differentiate emotions<\/strong>.”<\/p>\n “These findings suggest that the influx of co-experienced emotions in adolescence makes this a period of more murkiness in what emotions one is feeling<\/strong>,” Nook explains.<\/p>\n In the study, 143 participants, ranging in age from 5 to 25, completed a set of emotion-related tasks. To assess understanding of different emotion words, the researchers asked participants to define 27 different emotion terms. The researchers used five of these emotion terms — angry, disgusted, sad, scared, and upset — in a subsequent emotion differentiation task. In this task, participants viewed a series of 20 images showing a negative scene of some kind. Participants indicated how much they felt each of the five negative emotions when looking at an image by sliding a bar on a scale to the appropriate number (from 0 = not at all to 100 = very).<\/p>\n The results revealed a U-shaped pattern in participants’ experiences of negative emotions, with differentiation between emotions decreasing from childhood to adolescence and increasing again from adolescence to early adulthood.<\/p>\n Although children showed high emotion differentiation, their ratings differed from participants of other ages in that the emotions they reported did not overlap — they showed a stronger tendency to report experiencing one emotion at a time. Adolescents, on the other hand, were more likely to report experiencing several highly-correlated emotions at one time. Adults tended to report feeling several emotions simultaneously, but they appeared to be able to distinguish between emotions across trials.<\/p>\n “We found that the non-linear shape for emotion differentiation arises because children are more likely to report feeling only one emotion at a time,” says Harvard University professor Leah Somerville, senior author on the study. “These singular ratings of emotions result in differentiated emotional experiences, but they aren’t adult-like because adults differentiate emotions even when they are co-experienced.”<\/p>\n The results show that the means by which individuals differentiate emotions vary according to their developmental stage, suggesting a developmental trajectory that can be confirmed in future research with longitudinal data.<\/p>\n And the findings illuminate one reason why adolescence is a special, more vulnerable, time in emotional development:<\/p>\n “Adolescence is a period of heightened risk for the onset of psychopathology<\/strong>, and now we know that this is also a period when there’s less clarity in what one is feeling<\/strong> — something that lots of work has already connected to mental illness<\/strong>,” Nook says. “We need to do a lot more work to draw a firm link between these two things, but it’s possible that increases in co-experienced emotions makes it more difficult for teens to differentiate and regulate their emotions, potentially contributing to risk of mental illness.”<\/p>\n “We hope to see how this finding might help us know more about when emotions go awry in adolescence,” Nook concludes.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From the Association for Psychological Science press release: Adolescents don’t distinguish between negative emotions as clearly as younger children and adults in their 20s do, according to findings published in\u00a0Psychological… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5,346],"tags":[70,122,49,452,69,214,365],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26840"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26840"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26840\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26933,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26840\/revisions\/26933"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26840"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26840"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26840"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/AnxiousTeen.jpg\")
Adolescents don’t distinguish between negative emotions as clearly as younger children and adults in their 20s do<\/strong>, according to findings published in\u00a0Psychological Science<\/em>, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The study sheds light on how experiences of emotion vary at different ages<\/strong> and why adolescence may be a particularly vulnerable period in emotional development<\/strong>.<\/p>\n