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Language for emotions in adolescents with externalizing and internalizing disorders
Richard O'Kearney1, Mark R Dadds
1Australian National University, Canberra, ACT 0200, Australia. Richard.Okearney@anu.edu.au
Development and Psychopathology
|June 10, 2006
Summary
Adolescents with internalizing or externalizing disorders use less specific emotion language than typically developing peers. Their emotion word use differs based on the disorder and emotion type, highlighting domain-specific language patterns.
Area of Science:
- Psychology
- Developmental Psychology
- Clinical Psychology
Background:
- Emotion language is crucial for emotional regulation.
- Adolescents with behavioral or emotional disorders may exhibit atypical emotion language.
- Understanding these differences is key to targeted interventions.
Purpose of the Study:
- To compare emotion language structure and quality in adolescents with externalizing disorders, internalizing disorders, and no disorder.
- To investigate how emotion language varies across different emotion-eliciting contexts.
- To determine if deficits are global or domain-specific.
Main Methods:
- Compared emotion language in 3 groups: externalizing disorders (N=21), internalizing disorders (N=18), and no disorder (N=16).
- Elicited emotion language using vignettes (anger/sadness, fear), autobiographical experiences, and actual emotional challenges.
- Analyzed semantic specificity, intensity, and focus (inner-directed, outer-directed, cognitive, affective).
Main Results:
- Clinical adolescents used fewer semantically specific emotion terms for anger, sadness, and fear compared to typical adolescents.
- Internalizing youth used inner-directed, situational, and less intense terms for anger/sadness, and cognitive terms for threats.
- Externalizing youth used more outer-directed, intense terms for anger/sadness, and direct affective terms for threats.
Conclusions:
- Adolescent emotion language differs between internalizing and externalizing disorders, not just a general deficit in externalizing groups.
- Emotion language is affected differently by disorder type and specific emotion domains (anger/sadness vs. fear).
- Domain-specific analysis of emotion language is more informative for understanding emotion regulation in clinical populations than global assessments.
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