Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-r5fsc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-22T16:30:23.216Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Age-related differences in valence and arousal of emotion concepts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 February 2021

Radek Trnka*
Affiliation:
Prague College of Psychosocial Studies (PVSPS), Prague, Czech Republic Palacky University Olomouc (OUSHI), Olomouc, Czech Republic
Josef Mana
Affiliation:
Prague College of Psychosocial Studies (PVSPS), Prague, Czech Republic Department of Neurology and Centre of Clinical Neuroscience, 1st Faculty of Medicine, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic
Martin Kuška
Affiliation:
Prague College of Psychosocial Studies (PVSPS), Prague, Czech Republic Palacky University Olomouc (OUSHI), Olomouc, Czech Republic
*
*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]

Abstract

Emotion concepts are representations that enable people to make sense of their own and others’ emotions. The present study, theoretically driven by the conceptual act theory, explores the overall spectrum of emotion concepts in older adults and compares them with the emotion concepts of younger adults. Data from 178 older adults (⩾55 years) and 176 younger adults (20–30 years) were collected using the Semantic Emotion Space Assessment task. The arousal and valence of 16 discrete emotions – anger, fear, sadness, happiness, disgust, hope, love, hate, contempt, guilt, compassion, shame, gratefulness, envy, disappointment, and jealousy – were rated by the participants on a graphic scale bar. The results show that (a) older and younger adults did not differ in the mean valence ratings of emotion concepts, which indicates that older adults do not differ from younger adults in the way they conceptualise how pleasant or unpleasant emotions are. Furthermore, (b) older men rated emotion concepts as more arousing than younger men, (c) older adults rated sadness, disgust, contempt, guilt, and compassion as more arousing and (d) jealousy as less arousing than younger adults. The results of the present study indicate that age-related differentiation of conceptual knowledge seems to proceed more in the way that individuals understand how arousing their subjective representations of emotions are rather than how pleasant they are.

Type
Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Alea, N, Bluck, S and Semegon, AB (2004) Young and older adults’ expression of emotional experience: do autobiographical narratives tell a different story? Journal of Adult Development 11, 235250.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Alvarado, N and Jameson, KA (2011) Shared knowledge about emotion among Vietnamese and English bilingual and monolingual speakers. Journal of Cross-cultural Psychology 42, 963982.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barrett, LF (2006) Solving the emotion paradox: categorization and the experience of emotion. Personality and Social Psychology Review 10, 2046.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Barrett, LF and Russell, JA (1998) Independence and bipolarity in the structure of current affect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74, 967984.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barrett, LF, Lindquist, KA and Gendron, M (2007) Language as context for the perception of emotion. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 11, 327332.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Barrett, LF, Wilson-Mendenhall, CD and Barsalou, LW (2015) The conceptual act theory: a roadmap. In Barrett, LF and Russell, JA (eds), The Psychological Construction of Emotion. New York, NY: Guilford Press, pp. 83110.Google Scholar
Bates, D, Maechler, M, Bolker, B, Walker, S, Christensen, RHB, Singmann, H, Dai, B, Scheipl, F, Grothendieck G, Green P and Fox, J (2019) Package ‘lme4’. Available at https://github.com/lme4/lme4/.Google Scholar
Charles, ST (2005) Viewing injustice: greater emotion heterogeneity with age. Psychology and Aging 20, 159164.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Charles, ST and Carstensen, LL (2008) Unpleasant situations elicit different emotional responses in younger and older adults. Psychology and Aging 23, 495504.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Davidenko, M (2019) The ambiguities of self-governance: Russian middle-aged middle-class women's reflections on ageing. Ageing & Society 39, 609628.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ersner-Hershfield, H, Mikels, JA, Sullivan, SJ and Carstensen, LL (2008) Poignancy: mixed emotional experience in the face of meaningful endings. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 94, 158167.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ferrari, V, Bruno, N, Chattat, R and Codispoti, M (2017) Evaluative ratings and attention across the life span: emotional arousal and gender. Cognition and Emotion 31, 552563.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Fox, J (2003) Effect displays in R for generalised linear models. Journal of Statistical Software 8, 127.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fox, J and Weisberg, S (2011) An {R} Companion to Applied Regression. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.Google Scholar
Gomez, P, von Gunten, A and Danuser, B (2013) Content-specific gender differences in emotion ratings from early to late adulthood. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology 54, 451458.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Grühn, D and Smith, J (2008) Characteristics for 200 words rated by young and older adults: age-dependent evaluations of German adjectives (AGE). Behavior Research Methods 40, 10881097.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hartman, M and Stratton-Salib, BC (2007) Age differences in concept formation. Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology 29, 198214.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Heywood, W, Minichiello, V, Lyons, A, Fileborn, B, Hussain, R, Hinchliff, S, Malta, S, Barrett, C and Dow, B (2019) The impact of experiences of ageism on sexual activity and interest in later life. Ageing & Society 39, 795814.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Janowski, K, Kurpas, D, Kusz, J, Mroczek, B and Jedynak, T (2013) Health-related behavior, profile of health locus of control and acceptance of illness in patients suffering from chronic somatic diseases. Plos One 8, e63920.10.1371/journal.pone.0063920CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kehoe, EG, Toomey, JM, Balsters, JH and Bokde, AL (2013) Healthy aging is associated with increased neural processing of positive valence but attenuated processing of emotional arousal: an fMRI study. Neurobiology of Aging 34, 809821.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Keil, A and Freund, AM (2009) Changes in the sensitivity to appetitive and aversive arousal across adulthood. Psychology and Aging 24, 668680.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kunzmann, U and Grühn, D (2005) Age differences in emotional reactivity: the sample case of sadness. Psychology and Aging 20, 4759.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kunzmann, U and Thomas, S (2014) Multidirectional age differences in anger and sadness. Psychology and Aging 29, 1627.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kunzmann, U, Richter, D and Schmukle, SC (2013) Stability and change in affective experience across the adult life span: analyses with a national sample from Germany. Emotion 13, 1086–1095.10.1037/a0033572CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kunzmann, U, Kappes, C and Wrosch, C (2014) Emotional aging: a discrete emotions perspective. Frontiers in Psychology 5, 380.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Labouvie-Vief, G (2003) Dynamic integration: affect, cognition, and the self in adulthood. Current Directions in Psychological Science 12, 201206.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Labouvie-Vief, G and Medler, M (2002) Affect optimization and affect complexity: modes and styles of regulation in adulthood. Psychology and Aging 17, 571588.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Magai, C, Consedine, NS, Krivoshekova, YS, Kudadjie-Gyamfi, E and McPherson, R (2006) Emotion experience and expression across the adult life span: insights from a multimodal assessment study. Psychology and Aging 21, 303317.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Mather, M and Carstensen, LL (2005) Aging and motivated cognition: the positivity effect in attention and memory. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 9, 496502.10.1016/j.tics.2005.08.005CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Neiss, MB, Leigland, LA, Carlson, NE and Janowsky, JS (2009) Age differences in perception and awareness of emotion. Neurobiology of Aging 30, 13051313.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Oaten, M, Stevenson, RJ and Case, TI (2009) Disgust as a disease-avoidance mechanism. Psychological Bulletin 135, 303321.10.1037/a0014823CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Oosterwijk, S, Rotteveel, M, Fischer, AH and Hess, U (2009) Embodied emotion concepts: how generating words about pride and disappointment influences posture. European Journal of Social Psychology 39, 457466.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Orth, U, Robins, RW and Soto, CJ (2010) Tracking the trajectory of shame, guilt, and pride across the life span. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 99, 10611071.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
R Core Team (2019) R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing. Vienna: R Foundation for Statistical Computing. Available at https://www.R-project.org/.Google Scholar
Ready, RE, Santorelli, GD and Mather, MA (2017) Judgment and classification of emotion terms by older and younger adults. Aging and Mental Health 21, 684692.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rozin, P, Haidt, J, McCauley, CR, Lewis, M and Haviland-Jones, JM (2000) Handbook of Emotions. New York, NY: Guilford Press, pp. 637653.Google Scholar
Russell, JA (1983) Pancultural aspects of the human conceptual organization of emotions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 45, 12811288.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Santini, ZI, Koyanagi, A, Tyrovolas, S, Haro, JM and Koushede, V (2019) The association of social support networks and loneliness with negative perceptions of ageing: evidence from the Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing (TILDA). Ageing & Society 39, 795814.10.1017/S0144686X17001465CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schneider, S and Stone, AA (2015) Mixed emotions across the adult life span in the United States. Psychology and Aging 30, 369382.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Sedláková, T and Souralová, A (2019) Emerging age asymmetries in the research relationship: challenges of exploring transition to the fourth age. Ageing & Society 39, 409433.10.1017/S0144686X17001040CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Seider, BH, Shiota, MN, Whalen, P and Levenson, RW (2011) Greater sadness reactivity in late life. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 6, 186194.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Tetley, J, Lee, DM, Nazroo, J and Hinchliff, S (2018) Let's talk about sex – what do older men and women say about their sexual relations and sexual activities? A qualitative analysis of ELSA Wave 6 data. Ageing & Society 38, 497521.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Trnka, R, Lačev, A, Balcar, K, Kuška, M and Tavel, P (2016) Modeling semantic emotion space using a 3D hypercube-projection: an innovative analytical approach for the psychology of emotions. Frontiers in Psychology 7, 522.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Trnka, R, Poláčková Šolcová, I and Tavel, P (2018) Components of cultural complexity relating to emotions: a conceptual framework. New Ideas in Psychology 51, 2733.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Trnka, R, Cabelkova, I, Kuška, M and Nikolai, T (2019) Cognitive decline influences emotional creativity in the elderly. Creativity Research Journal 31, 93101.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wurm, LH (2011) Decreasing complexity of affective space in older adults lower on cognitive control: affective effects in a nonaffective task and with nonaffective stimuli. Psychology and Aging 26, 716730.CrossRefGoogle Scholar