This thesis investigated how different groups of people process the emotionality of linguistic stimuli. Recently, individual and group differences have become topics of interest in psychology, but very few studies have investigated how behavioural responses to emotional stimuli vary as a function of participant demographics. The first study focused on the contrast between how native and non-native speakers of English process the emotional content of English words. The study of emotional processing in non-native speakers is a highly contested issue in the field of bilingualism and experimental psychology. Chapter 2 reports the largest collection of emotion ratings of English words from non-native speakers and provides a theoretical perspective on how bilingual speakers process emotion. In order to facilitate the investigation of individual differences in emotional processing, the field needs a reliable method that allows for the measurement of subtle differences between individuals. In Chapter 3, I demonstrate that a novel ‘slider’ method of measuring valence, proposed by Warriner et al. (2018), is a reliable tool for measuring affective responses to words along a fine-grained sliding scale. In Chapter 4, I demonstrate the use of the sliding scale with the aim of capturing affective differences between those with and without depressive symptoms. This chapter reports that compared to those without depressive symptoms, those with depressive symptoms i) exhibit attenuated responses to emotionally laden stimuli, and ii) are unable to take on the perspective of someone without depression. Overall, this thesis reports on the emotional responses in two hotly debated groups, as well as providing a new method of measuring emotional responses to linguistic stimuli. These findings underscore the importance of studying emotional processing beyond normative populations. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This study examines associations of emotion language with emotion understanding and emotion regulation during the preschool years. There is evidence that the way parents talk about emotions with their children promotes children's emotion understanding and regulation (e.g. Bird and Reese, 2006; Laible, 2011). However, there has been little attention paid to associations of these outcomes with children's emotion language. In this study, I examined associations of children's emotion language on their emotion understanding and emotion regulation, and tested whether parents' emotion language was indirectly associated with these outcomes through children's emotion language. One hundred fifty-six 3- to 5-year-old children participated with their primary caregiver. Parent-child dyads engaged in an emotion-laden conversation to measure parent and child emotion language. Children also engaged in the locked box task (Cole et al., 2009; Goldsmith et al., 1993) to measure emotion regulation and completed the Diagnostic Analysis of Nonverbal Accuracy (Nowicki and Duke, 1994) to measure emotion understanding. Results differed for younger preschoolers (36 - 53 months) compared with older preschoolers (54 - 69 months) in regard to emotion regulation. For younger preschoolers, path analyses indicated an indirect effect in which parent emotion talk was associated with less attention shifting during the locked box task. There was also a direct effect in which children's greater use of emotion labels was positively associated with emotion understanding. Results may reflect the rapid emotional development occurring during the preschool years and suggest the importance of early emotion socialization. / Ph. D.