Lay theories of emotions (pride, joy, sadness, jealousy, envy, and anger): life-span trends.

The content and richness of lay theories” (LT) of emotion of Italian male and female adolescents (N=154, 14-year-old; N=136 17-year-old), young adults (N=184 ), and mature adults (N=120, about 44 year-old) were studied using a questionnaire that described, in a vignette format, events typical of one of 5 emotion constellations, namely pride, joy, sadness, jealousy, envy. The judged events differed moreover for their degree of “salience” - defined on the basis of results obtained in previous studies. Subjects attributed to same- or to opposite-sex event-protagonists various aspects of the emotional experience, including perceived 'adequacy' of the experience, social sharing of emotions, conflict and uncertainty about felt emotions. Multiple-choice answers were based on lists of cognate items - e.g., for the felt-emotion question, answer categories included “Joy, happiness, euphoria, pride, cheerfulness”, and “Anxiety, fear, anguish, dread” . Results showed that subjects expressed quite rich and complex LT already at the youngest age, but that LT both get richer, and qualitatively different, at later ages. The beliefs subjects hold, and their “richness”, varied as a function of the specific emotion constellation, of its hedonic tone (e.g., LT for negatively toned constellations were typically more articulate than those for positively toned ones), and of salient features of the judged event (e.g., reactions such as attempts at regulation characterized mostly negatively valenced constellations, especially in relation to specific events). Men and women overall expressed similar, “egalitarian” rather than gender-differentiated theories; observed differences, however, tended to be gender-congruent, i.e., stereotypical ones. The extent to which the obtained results are culture-specific rather than ‘universal’ needs to be further investigated in cross-cultural studies, to single out similarities and differences in lay theories.