The Development of Emotional Concepts: A Replication with a German Sample

Abstract

Although children make more errors than adults when they have to recognise the emotional expression of a photographed face, they structure emotional concepts just as adults do, by the two dimensions pleasure/ displeasure and high/low arousal (Bullock & Russell 1984, 1985, 1986). This was demonstrated by the fact that the children's recognition errors were not randomly distributed across all emotions. Rather, emotions were confused that were similar to each other in terms of pleasantness and arousal. Moreover, multidimensional scaling procedures yielded the same two dimensions mentioned earlier underlying the responses of 3to 5-year-old children and adults. In the present study we attempted a cross-cultural replication of these results with German-speaking kindergarten children and adults. Although slight differences emerged for the meanings of single emotion terms we confirmed the previous findings, thus adding validity to the model outlined by Bullock and Russell (1986).