Emotion word production tasks grant insight into the development of emotion word organization and accessibility.

Abstract

Children are often instructed to "use their words" to communicate their emotions, which requires them to quickly access words that best describe their feelings. Adults vary in their ability to bring both nonemotion and emotion words to mind (two capacities called verbal fluency and emotion fluency). However, no studies have examined how emotion fluency emerges across development, despite the fact that mastering emotion language is an important developmental task. A cross-sectional sample of participants aged 4-25 years (N = 194) generated as many fruit words as possible in 60 s (to measure verbal fluency) and as many emotion words as possible in 60 s (to measure emotion fluency). Emotion fluency was highly correlated with verbal fluency, and both showed similar increases across age, plateauing in late adolescence. Participants produced more negative emotion words than positive or neutral words, and these proportions were invariant across age. Network analyses shed light on the emergence of semantic networks underlying emotion organization across age. Finally, age of acquisition, valence, dominance, concreteness, and word length were significantly associated with the order in which emotion words came to participants' minds, suggesting that these dimensions are associated with the accessibility of emotion concepts. Interestingly, the influence of these dimensions on the order of emotion word production was invariant across age. Results from this study illustrate the developmental emergence of emotion fluency and provide new insight into the key dimensions that are associated with which emotion words rapidly come to mind. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).