Stress, Physiological Arousal, and Emotion Language Use in Childhood and Adolescence

• In Event: A Multisystem Perspective for Understanding the Role of Physiological Regulation in Child Development

Abstract

In contrast to a large body of work investigating the links between emotion language use and well-being in adults, relatively few studies have focused on such links across childhood and adolescence. Yet, emotional competence, which includes such processes as emotion understanding, regulation, and language, undergoes considerable change with development and has implications for children’s and adolescents’ (youth’s) well-being. When considering emotion language specifically, few studies have focused on variations in that language, including how those variations are shaped by the context within which such language is used. Under conditions of high stress, for example, youth’s attention may be directed toward emotion-related, especially negative, content, leading to high levels of negative language. Alternatively, youth may use language to facilitate self-regulation, helping them cope with stress, such as, for example, using positive or avoiding negative language. The present study systematically tested these possibilities. We specifically examined how the amount and type of emotion language youth use to describe themselves vary when they are questioned in a high (HS) versus low (LS) stress context. We also explored how youth’s physiological and self-reported arousal while narrating, directly and in conjunction with age, shaped their emotion language.

In the study, 189 youth (M=10.68 years, 50.0% girls) completed a high or low-stress version of the Trier Social Stress Test-Modified (TSST-M; Yim et al., 2015), which required they give a speech about positive and negative qualities of themselves and complete a math task. The context was reliably varied between subjects to be either HS or LS. Self-report and physiological measures of arousal were collected during and after TSST-M. This included cortisol, which indexed changes in hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis (HPA) activation and salivary alpha amylase (sAA), which indexed sympathetic nervous system (SNS) activation. Emotion language was reliably coded from youth’s TSST-M speeches for amount and valence (coding of emotion and cognitive language using a customized dictionary in Linguistic Inquiry Word Count is also underway).

Preliminary analyses revealed that stress condition, age, and physiological arousal, the latter of which differ by system, all predicted the type of emotion language youth include in their narratives. A stress condition X age (continuous) X language type (positive vs. negative) ANCOVA (total words covaried) revealed that youth provided more positive than negative language but only in the HS condition (positive word Ms=19.22 and 15.04; negative word Ms=1.76 and 2.06, for the HS and LS conditions, respectively). Linear regressions revealed that youth’s physiological arousal during the TSST-M, along with stress condition and age, predicted emotion language. Regarding physiological responses, increased cortisol reactivity was associated with fewer positive words, whereas increased sAA reactivity was associated with more negative words. Subsequent analyses will evaluate associations among stress condition, age, physiological and self-reported arousal, and other types of language content (e.g., cognitive process words) potentially important for well-being. Analyses will also test whether emotion language is differentially linked to arousal peaks versus recovery of the individual and combined systems, which may shed additional insight into the role of language in self-regulation across childhood.

Authors

• Shreya Mukhopadhyay, University of California - Irvine
  Presenting Author

• Jodi A Quas, University of California, Irvine
  Non-Presenting Author