Judgment and classification of emotion terms by older and younger adults

ABSTRACT

Objectives: Theoretical models of adult development suggest changes in emotion systems with age. This study determined how younger and older adults judged and classified 70 emotion terms that varied in valence and arousal, and that have been used in previous studies of adult aging and emotion. The terms were from the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule – Expanded (PANAS-X) and the (KS) affect scales.

Method: Older (n = 32) and younger adults (n = 111) engaged in a card sort task which determined how the 70 emotion terms were classified (i.e. grouped) in relation to one another. Activation and valence ratings of emotion terms were collected.

Results: There were 17 age group differences in item ratings for activation and 19 for valence. Older adults tended to rate emotion terms and scales as more positive and activating than younger persons. Card sort data indicated similarity in conceptualizations of emotion terms across groups with exceptions for serene, sad, and lonely.

Conclusions: Research that utilizes self-report emotion data from older and younger persons should consider how perceptions of emotion terms may vary systematically with age. The constructs of sadness, loneliness, and serene may be age-variant and necessitate age-based adjustments in assessment and intervention. Further, older adults may perceive some emotion terms to be more activating and positive than younger persons.

KEYWORDS:

• Emotion
• aging
• classification
• valence
• arousal

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. With regard to emotion experiences, supporting evidence for these theories is mixed. Indeed, data are not clear as to whether or not older adults experience more mixed, complex, or heterogeneous emotions than younger adults (Carstensen et al., 2011; Charles, 2005; Grühn, Lumley, Diehl, & Labouvie-Vief, 2013; Magai et al., 2006; Ong & Bergeman, 2004; Ready, Carvalho, & Weinberger, 2008; Scott, Sliwinski, Mogle, & Almeida, 2014).

2. Whereas there is evidence that older persons are less accurate than younger persons in judging certain facial expressions (i.e. anger and sadness (Isaacowitz et al., 2007)), these data are not reviewed here because the current study is not concerned with the accuracy of emotion perceptions, but rather patterns of age group differences, if they exist, in appraising emotion terms.

3. More younger than older adults completed the measures for this study; this is largely due to two factors. First, some measures used for other projects were changed after data had been collected from 65 younger adults, but prior to older adult data collection. Thus, for the measures in the current study, we had more younger than older adult data. Second, again for another study, we oversampled younger persons to collect more data from male participants to allow for gender analyses. We did not judge any benefit from randomly selecting from the younger sample to form a smaller subset to compare with older adults; rather we fully utilized the data that were collected.

4. Only the 16 KS items were used in this task because (1) the KS offers a nice range of high and low, PA and NA terms and (2) each item was judged as to its correspondence with every other term, resulting in 120 comparison items on this task. Including the additional 54 terms from the PANAS-X would have resulted in an unwieldy task for participants.

5. Results for down were highly similar to those for sad and are not reported.

6. It is unclear if resting is the best translation of the German word for this scale; resting is listed in Table 1 of Kessler and Staudinger (2009), in which item-factor loadings are listed. In Appendix A, the item is indicated to be at rest, which may have sufficiently different meaning from resting to be a less ideal measure of low arousal PA for older adults in the United States.