Emotion differentiation falls from childhood to adolescence and rises from adolescence to adulthood

What is it about?

Emotion researchers have been studying how people experience emotions. One way that people differ in their emotional experiences is called emotion differentiation. While some people can clearly differentiate different emotional experiences (knowing when they are feeling sad but not angry, for example), other people struggle to separate their emotions into specific types. We studied how this ability varies across development (ages 4-25). We found that emotion differentiation was actually high in childhood, then fell in adolescence (minimum around age 15-16) before rising again into adulthood. Follow-up analyses suggested that children had high emotion differentiation scores because they tended to report only feeling one emotion at a time. This "mutually exclusive" reporting of emotions gave them high differentiation scores. Hence, this study showed that children tend to report feeling one emotion at a time, adolescents co-experience emotions but struggle to differentiate them, and then adults co-experience emotions but have greater ability to differentiate them.

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Why is it important?

At a basic level, this study helps us understand how emotional experiences change across development. We now know more about how emotions are experienced (one-at-a-time or in concert) and how they are differentiated at different stages of development. Additionally, prior work has connected stronger emotion differentiation to better mental health. We also know that adolescence is a period of increased risk for the onset of mental illness. Although speculative, our findings might connect these two ideas: Low emotion differentiation and increased risk of mental illness might relate to each other in adolescence. Future work should test this idea specifically.