The development of emotion concepts: A story superiority effect in older children and adolescents

• We examined the development of emotion concepts in 8- to 20-year-olds.
• Participants were more likely to use the expected label for stories than for faces.
• This Story Superiority Effect held for all ages and for four of the five emotions.
• Emotion concepts continue to develop into adolescence, an under-studied age group.

Contrary to traditional assumptions, young children are more likely to correctly label someone’s emotion from a story that describes the causes and consequences of the emotion than from the person’s facial expression. This story superiority effect was examined in a sample of older children and adolescents (N = 90, 8–20 years) for the emotions of fear, disgust, shame, embarrassment, and pride. Participants freely labeled the emotion they inferred from a story describing a cause and consequence of each emotion and, separately, from the corresponding facial expression. In each of five age groups, the expected emotion label was used for the emotion story significantly more than for the corresponding facial expression (except for pride). The story superiority effect is strong from childhood to early adulthood and opens the door to new accounts of how emotion concepts develop.