The acquisition of emotion-laden words from childhood to adolescence

Studies investigating how children acquire emotional vocabularies have mainly focused on words that describe feelings or affective states (emotion-label words, e.g., joy) trough subjective assessments of the children’s lexicon reported by their parents or teachers. In the current cross-sectional study, we objectively examined the age of acquisition of words that relate to emotions without explicitly referring to affective states (emotion-laden words, e.g., cake, tomb, rainbow) using a picture naming task. Three hundred and sixty participants belonging to 18 age groups from preschool to adolescence overtly named line drawings corresponding to positive, negative, and neutral concrete nouns. The results of regression and mixed model analyses indicated that positive emotion-laden words are learnt earlier in life. This effect was independent of the contribution of other lexical and semantic factors (familiarity, word frequency, concreteness, word length). It is proposed that the prioritized acquisition of positive emotion-laden words might be the consequence of the communicative style and contextual factors associated with the interaction between children and caregivers. We also discuss the implications of our findings for proposals that highlight the role of language in emotion perception and understanding

The genetics of self-reported trait impulsivity: Contribution of catecholaminergic gene variants in European ancestry individuals

Increased trait impulsivity is a core element in several mental disorders. Given the durable and consistent nature of trait impulsivity, studies have explored its relation to stable biological measures. Variation in catecholaminergic neurotransmission by genetic variants could be one of these biological substrates. Here, 905 participants of European-ancestry completed the Barratt Impulsiveness Scale–11 and were genotyped in three single nucleotide polymorphisms related to catecholaminergic neurotransmission: the DRD2/ ANKK Taq1A, the C957T DRD2 and the Val158Met of the COMT gene. We found significant main effects of Val158Met and C957T on BIS-11 score. Also, interactions with gender were significant in both SNPs with a tendency to slightly different genotype and allele associations with the BIStotal score between male and female participants. Whereas in females, higher impulsivity scores were obtained by participants with the Val158Met heterozygous genotype (Met/Val), data indicate a trend towards a higher impulsivity score in male Val-allele carriers. In the case of C957T, only a tentative association between male Tallele carriers and higher impulsivity scores in comparison to CC genotype carriers could be established. No significant associations were found between BIS-11 and Taq1A. We provide further evidence for a gender-specific implication of Val158Met and C957T in trait impulsivity

CROWD-5e: A Croatian psycholinguistic database of affective norms for five discrete emotions

Authors: Bojana Ćoso, Marc Guasch, Irena Bogunović, Maria Pilar Ferré Romeu, and José Antonio Hinojosa Poveda