Perception Of Valence And Arousal In German Emotion Terms – A Comparison Between 9-Year-Old Children And Adults

Two major semantic features of emotion concepts have been shown to impact performance in<br> emotion perception tasks: valence and arousal. To design psycholinguistic experiments with<br> emotion terms as stimuli, norms are required which indicate valence and arousal values for<br> individual words. Although such norms are usually obtained from ratings of adults, they are<br> often also used in developmental studies. This procedure raises the question of whether<br> children and adults perceive emotional valence and arousal of words in the same way, and<br> consequently, whether adults’ ratings are adequate when constructing stimulus sets for<br> children. The present study obtained valence and arousal ratings for 48 German emotion<br> terms from three different groups: 9-year-old children and adults tested in a controlled<br> laboratory setting, and adults tested via online survey. Results demonstrate high correlations<br> for valence and arousal across settings. The comparison between children and adults also<br> revealed high correlations, suggesting that children at the age of 9 already display adult-like<br> behavior in their evaluation of emotion terms. A small difference was found for absolute<br> rating values of arousal, with children rating words less arousing than adults. Overall, using<br> adults’ norms in developmental studies on word processing seems to be a valid procedure.