Affective Abstraction and Emotion Differentiation Across Development

To master a culture’s categorical systems, growing minds must learn both to identify abstract similarities that bind two individual instances into a common category (e.g., recognizing what makes Scooby and Snoopy both “dogs”) and to differentiate instances that belong to different categories (e.g., calling Garfield a “cat” rather than a “dog”). Research has charted how children learn to “lump” and “split” categories in the cognitive literature, but we know much less about how emotion categories develop. Here, we administered laboratory tasks assessing affective abstraction (i.e., the ability to match two images that induce similar affective experiences) and emotion differentiation (i.e., how specifically one categorizes one’s emotions as distinct) to a cross-sectional sample of participants in the USA aged 10-25 (50.62% women). Affective abstraction scores were largely uncorrelated with age, but the ability to match cross-category stimuli of the same valence (e.g., a negative-affect-inducing house and a negative-affect-inducing animal) increased with age. Interestingly, affective abstraction and emotion differentiation scores were positively associated, especially in youth participants. Thus, abstraction and differentiation are not merely opposites of each other (i.e., it’s not the case that people either tend to chronically “lump” emotion categories or chronically “split” emotion categories). Instead, there may be shared cognitive processes that allow individuals to construct emotion categories that are both nuanced and general enough to conform to societal norms, and this covariance is most pronounced in youth. These results shed new light on the development of emotion categorization.